Speaking Truth To Power From The Slave Auction Block

Speaking truth to power is an often used cliche when a person hits a cord of truth on behalf of the powerless. I have often been encouraged to stand up and speak truth to power. Usually, I do not have a problem articulating my opinion on the major topics of the day.

Perhaps this is because many years ago my mother taught me to hate injustice with a passion. And so at great peril to liberty and finances, I have never shied away from expressing my opinion on issues of injustice and inequality.

Other than my mother’s encouragement to look power in the eyes and tell them the truth, I have often wondered where the courage to do this emanated.

Thanks to an enterprising correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, I now know that I have the genetic disposition to speak truth to power.

In 1889, an Ohio newspaper, The Salem Daily News, ran a story about my great great grandfather Dempsey Clark and his brother Bristow Clark. As the story goes, Dempsey Clark was born in 1825 in North Carolina. About 25 years later he finds himself standing on a slave auction block in Hawkinsville, Georgia with his brother Bristow and “several thousand slaves [who] were brought in by the slave traders.”

A rumor circulated among the men and women in bondage that a particular planter in the area was mean and treated his workers poorly.

The Clark brothers stood erect, side by side, on the auction block in the full…