By Colbert I. King
On last Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Frank D. Hargrove, a Republican lawmaker in Virginia's House of Delegates, said that instead of seeking a formal apology from the commonwealth for slavery, "black citizens should get over it." Hargrove also reportedly wondered how far such apologies should go. "Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"
Frank Hargrove is one reason that young African Americans should never take their hard-won rights for granted. His outlook is also a wake-up call to some of my Jewish friends who think they have it made.
He has nothing I want, including an apology. But I'm not getting over slavery.
There's nothing quite like going to a county office building down in Culpeper County, Va., and finding evidence of your family's enslavement. I did that several years ago.
Pages of land records confirmed the story I had heard since I was a young boy: that my late mother's maiden name, Colbert (my first name), was taken from a white Culpeper County family that had the last name Colbert and that owned my great-grandfather and his siblings before the Civil War...
