Those who cannot remember the past...

...are condemned to repeat it.   George Santayana

History never repeats itself but it rhymes.   attrib. Mark Twain

So many people take on the mantle of famous figures from the past without bothering to learn the real story.
Case in point - from The American Conservative:

A Lesson From Robert E. Lee
There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.

That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after the great resister. That means that Between the World and Me, the best-selling anti-racist tract of the current century, which takes the form of letters from Coates to his son, is addressed to someone named after a prolific enslaver of black Africans.

History is complicated, isn’t it?

I always find it amusing when "black power" agitators take a muslim name and convert.  They are assuming the identity of those barbarians (and I am using the term quite correctly) who enslaved their ancestors and sold their ancestors to the slave traders in the first place.  And also, not to forget that it was only 30% of the slave trade that made it's way to America. The other 70% was to French and Spanish interests in the Caribbean and South America. History is indeed complicated.  There is not one narrative that can be pushed through the media.  History is a complicated sticky mess. On the plus side - this makes for a fascinating study.  On the minus side - people looking for a quick narrative will often cherry pick a few bright and shiny points of interest to bolster their narrative and are later surprised to know that they were rooting for the wrong side all along.