 |
| Ben Affleck |
Far less people would have known about Ben Affleck's ancestry if he had not made such a big deal of trying to hide it.
Affleck admitted that he successfully pressured Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to edit his Georgia slaveholding ancestor, Benjamin Cole, out of an episode of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” that featured his family history.
Part of that hidden information was:
- Levi (Lee) Roberts, Affleck’s great-great-great grandfather, also of Holly Springs, Marshall County, Mississippi, owned 7 slaves that same year, according the 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules.
- Gates certainly missed several dramatic reveals, including the fact that when Affleck’s mother, Christopher Ann Boldt traveled to Mississippi in 1965 to support African-American civil rights (not in 1964 as a Freedom Rider, as Gates inaccurately claimed in the episode), dozens of her second and third cousins were living in Mississippi, some quite possibly members of the Democratic political power structure that supported segregation there at the time.
