Beto O’Rourke said Sunday that he and his wife, Amy, are descended from people who owned slaves.
In a post on the website Medium and in an email to supporters, the Democratic presidential candidate said he was recently given documents showing that a paternal great-great-great grandfather of his owned two women in the 1850s.
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Their names — Rose and Eliza — were listed among the man’s possessions on a property log, he said.
O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, said it is also likely that a maternal great-great-great grandfather owned slaves in the 1860s. He said his wife had one ancestor who owned slaves and another who was in the Confederate Army.
“Something that we’ve been thinking about and talking about in town hall meetings and out on the campaign — the legacy of slavery in the United States — now has a much more personal connection,” O’Rourke wrote.
O’Rourke has spoken openly while campaigning about his own privilege — and about inequities facing people of color. But his writing Sunday placed the issue in a far more personal context.
His ancestors, O’Rourke wrote, were “able to build wealth on the backs and off the sweat of others, wealth that they would then be able to pass down to their children and their children’s children. In some way, and in some form, that advantage would pass through to me and my children.”
O’Rourke’s family history was first raised with O’Rourke’s campaign by The Guardian. According to The Guardian, the owner of Rose and Eliza lived in Kentucky and also in Kansas territory.
In his Medium post, O’Rourke wrote of the generational effects of slavery, lamenting that “misfortune was passed through the generations from Rose and Eliza to their descendants who are alive today.”
“Rose and Eliza were denied their freedom and the benefits that their labor produced; they and their children were then denied their civil rights after the end of Reconstruction; and their descendants endured open terrorism, economic exclusion and racism in the form of Jim Crow, lynchings, convict leasing, voter suppression, red lining, predatory lending, and mass incarceration,” he wrote. “Everything their descendants have accomplished in their lives is despite having all of these odds stacked against them.”
While acknowledging he benefits “from a system that my ancestors built to favor themselves at the expense of others,” O’Rourke wrote, “that only increases the urgency I feel to help change this country so that it works for those who have been locked-out of — or locked-up in — this system.”
O’Rourke pledged, as he has before, to pursue a range of health care, criminal justice, education and economic policies to help people of color. And he said, “I will continue to support reparations, beginning with an important national conversation on slavery and racial injustice.”