Returning to One's Roots - Is Kunta Kinte Here?

 

The Obamas joined the elite Martha’s Vineyard community in a nearly 7,000 square foot home that sits on roughly 29 acres, facing the Edgartown Great Pond. Interestingly, Martha’s Vineyard is just short of 95 percent white. It has less than a two percent black population.

 

The Dukes County Registry of Deeds recorded the $11.75 million price. The actual buyer was a nominee trust representing the former First Family. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recognizes the realty trust, also known as a nominee trust, as a useful vehicle to hold legal title to real estate. A revocable or irrevocable trust can serve as the beneficial owner.

As a nominee trust, the trustees can act only with the express authority of the beneficiaries. Although the trust must have beneficiaries, they do not need to be listed in the trust instrument to maintain their anonymity. It does beg the question about which masters now own Barack and Michelle today. 

             Roots Anthology ~ Alex Haley & the History of Slavery                        by Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

Black commentator Stanley Crouch doesn’t mince words when it comes to Alex Haley.  Haley, Crouch insists, was a “ruthless hustler” and “one of the biggest damn liars this country has ever seen.” Crouch likens Haley to Tawana Brawley, the young black woman who infamously lied about being raped and humiliated by a white police officer.  Like the lie concocted by Brawley and abetted by the likes of Al Sharpton, Haley’s story is also a “hoax” that beautifully illustrates “how history and tragic fact can be pillaged by an individual willing to exploit whatever the naïve might consider sacred.”

Crouch explains: “Haley came on the scene when Negroes were becoming obsessed with their African ancestry and were having overwrought reactions to a tale of slavery that always, conveniently, left out the crucial role of the cooperative and profiting Africans.”

Haley also claimed that his great-great-great-great grandfather, Kunta Kinte, arrived in Annapolis, Maryland, aboard the slave ship Lord Ligonier in September of 1767. There he was purchased by John Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, who gave him the name “Toby.” - all has since been debunked.

In the late 1960s, Harry Courlander — a white man — composed The African, a fictional work about a young African boy who is captured, made to endure the horrors of the mid-Atlantic passage, and eventually sold into slavery in America. In 1978 he sued Haley for plagiarism. Haley agreed to an out of court settlement whereby he would pay Courlander $650,000 (roughly $2 million in today’s currency).