Wait a whole damn minute.......
Skrrrrrrrrrrrrt
I'm calling the research that this white man did into question.
His research is also not telling the whole story.
The man in the middle is Phillip Livingston.
Ancestry did an ad where they put the descendants of the signers in their place. Here is the ad.
The woman standing in the middle is a BLACK woman.
I KNOW her. She is a good friend of my grandparents. And her son was a mentor of mine for some years.
Her name is Madeline Murphy Rabb.
She is a vaunted black art dealer here in Chicago.
Madeline Murphy Rabb's Biography
This is a Chicago Tribune story detailing how she is descended from Phillip Livingston.
The resemblance between Christiana Williams Freeman, Madeline Murphy's great-grandmother, and Eleanor Roosevelt was no accident. They were, in fact, distant cousins. For Christiana indeed turned out to be the daughter of Philip Henry Livingston, grandson of Philip Livingston, a New York statesman who signed the Declaration of Independence, and Barbara Williams, a slave he brought to the United States from Jamaica. And, after more than a year of researching, Murphy's grandson, Christopher Rabb, 27, who has a degree in African and Afro-American studies from Yale, unearthed a copy of Christiana's 1909 death certificate to prove it.
A FAMILY AFFAIR IN BLACK AND WHITE
Phillip Livingston, signer of the Declaration, father owned slaves.
Philip Livingston (July 9, 1686 – February 11, 1749), the son of
Robert Livingston the Elder, and elder brother of
Robert Livingston of
Clermont. Philip was the second Lord of
Livingston Manor, a merchant, and
slave trader.
And so did his children and grand children (which is how Madeline is tied to him.) So I find it hard to believe that owning slaves miraculously skipped his generation from that of his father to his children. And even if he didn't, his family makes him a slaver by default.
Block out that their faces.
I'm sure the rest of them unblocked signers have immediate ties to slavery as well.
Edit: He did own slaves.
“When Robert died, Philip Livingston inherited six of the twelve slaves listed in his father's will (9).”
SOURCE: Accesed on 10/16/14
First Endowed Professorship