Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain likes to talk about being the son and grandson of Navy admirals, but his background goes back even further into Mississippi history.
His great-great grandfather is described thusly:
William Alexander McCain (b. North Carolina, 1812 – d. 1863), Confederate States Army, owned a 2,000-acre plantation in Carroll County, Mississippi and 52 slaves.
Among them were ancestors of former NAACP chair Myrlie Evers Williams.
The first John McCain was born on that plantation in 1851 and was elected sheriff of Carroll County, Miss., fall of 1889 and served 1 term; before that, he served from 1886 through 1889 as supervisor of Beat 2, Carroll County, Miss. during the Reconstruction era.
In 1937, a double-lynching occurred in the Carroll County town of Duck Hill, which was given significant publicity, only because the Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill was under consideration in the U. S. Congress. James R. Binford, son of the founder of Duck Hill, was the legislator and statesman who gave Mississippi the Jim Crow Law, which was later adopted by the Southern States.
In the 1990s, former Rep. Bob Livingston emerged as the descendant of colonial era slaveowners and even as the relative of current African-American families.
No wonder McCain got testy about “playing the race card.”
Posted By: John Templeton
Monday, September 8th 2008 at 11:19AM
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