SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Michael Thurmond thought he was reading familiar history at the burial place of Georgia's colonial founder. The son of a sharecropper and great-grandson of a Georgia slave, Thurmond became an attorney and has served for decades in state and local government. Historians have widely agreed Oglethorpe and his fellow Georgia trustees didn’t ban slavery because it was cruel to Black people. Escaped slaves captured in Oglethorpe’s Georgia were returned to slaveholders. Thurmond's book openly embraces such evidence that Oglethorpe's history with slavery was at times contradictory and unflattering.

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