I guess that’s why they never got along.

NEW YORK - Genealogists have found that civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendent of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Daily News said professional genealogists, working at the newspaper’s behest, recently uncovered the ancestral ties between one of the nation’s best known black leaders and a man who was once a prominent defender of segregation.

“I have always wondered what was the background of my family,” the newspaper quoted Sharpton as saying. “But nothing — nothing — could prepare me for this.”

How much do you want to bet that the Thurmonds were voting Democrat at the time they owned slaves?  I can pretty much assure you that they were, given that the Republican party was the abolitionist party at the time.  But I’m not expecting that little tid-bit of information to make it into reporting anywhere.

Nor do I expect any researchers to go poking into the slave-owning history of, say, Robert Byrd’s family.