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My ancestors owned slaves at a time when it was an accepted practice. Slavery was wrong, it was abolished, and that's that. More important than trying to make me feel guilty about the way society was 150 years ago is to focus on what can be done TODAY.
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But they sacrificed to protect their land at a time when THAT was an accepted practice. They were chivalrous at a time when THAT was an accepted practice. Are you proud of that? How come there's no "that's that" about their sacrifice and chivalry?
Re shameful parts of MLK's life, yes, we should try to understand the whole picture of an individual if we're doing a biographical analysis. If you're studying the whole civil rights movement, though, MLK's private life really didn't play much of a role, especially since it wasn't publicized at the time. It's a very poor comparison to the role of slavery in the antebellum South (foundation of the economy, greatest concentration of wealth, preserved permanently in the Confederate Constitution, etc.).