EXCLUSIVE: Now Ben Affleck's MOM reveals mistakes in documentary that censored star's family's slave-owning past as she says she did NOT take part in Freedom Summer or Freedom Rides

  • PBS Finding Your Roots show censored Ben Affleck's family history of slave ownership, it was revealed last week
  • It said his mother took part in Freedom Summer of 1964, campaigning for civil rights and host called her a Freedom Rider 
  • But she tells Daily Mail Online she is 'embarrassed' to be called Freedom Rider because 'I wasn't as good as they were'
  • And she says she went to South a year later than program's host, revered Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates Jr claimed on show
  • PBS is reviewing entire show after first Daily Mail Online revelation of censorship and is no longer speaking for Prof Gates
  • Publicly-funded broadcaster dropped claim Mrs Affleck was 'Freedom Rider' from its website after Daily Mail Online exposed the error

The documentary that censored Ben Affleck's slave-owning ancestors is now facing questions over its accuracy as his mother denied to Daily Mail Online that she was involved in Freedom Summer.

The episode of Finding Your Roots is already being investigated by its broadcaster, PBS, over whether its editorial code was breached by having the truth about Affleck's relatives censored.

Now another key element of the exploration of the Oscar-winner's past is under question over the assertion by PBS that Chris Affleck had been a 'Freedom Rider' in 1964 and taken part in Freedom Summer

On PBS's Finding Your Roots website, the episode guide states: 'Ben Affleck's mother was a Freedom Rider in 1964.'

And in the show itself, the documentary's host, Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates Jr, says Mrs Affleck had been part of 'Freedom Summer'.

As pictures of Mrs Affleck - then Chris Boldt - were shown juxtaposed with pictures of a group of Freedom Riders, Gates tells of the murder of three activists, one of the most notorious attacks on the Civil Rights movement in 1964, calling them Mrs Affleck's '

In fact, she told Daily Mail Online she was not a Freedom Rider - and was not in the South in 1964, but a year later. 

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Close: Ben Affleck and his activist mother Chris Anne, seen last October in Los Angeles

Close: Ben Affleck and his activist mother Chris Anne, seen last October in Los Angeles

Glum: A downcast Ben Affleck seen in Hollywood, with his wife Jennifer Garner, for the first time since his apology for censoring his family slavery past

Glum: A downcast Ben Affleck seen in Hollywood, with his wife Jennifer Garner, for the first time since his apology for censoring his family slavery past

Claim: How the PBS website called Chris Affleck a 'Freedom Rider' - which she told Daily Mail Online she was not. After Daily Mail Online revealed the error it amended it to claim she 'joined activists in 1964' - which she also denies

Claim: How the PBS website called Chris Affleck a 'Freedom Rider' - which she told Daily Mail Online she was not. After Daily Mail Online revealed the error it amended it to claim she 'joined activists in 1964' - which she also denies

Gates said: 'A lynch mob made up of members of the Klan and the local sheriff's department pulled over three of Ben's mom's fellow activists.'

He described the murders, then the camera cuts to Affleck and Gates says:'This is not some abstract threat. The Klan actually murdered these three Freedom Riders. And your mother was there at that time.'

But Mrs Affleck, 72, told Daily Mail Online that she was not part of the Freedom Rider campaign. 

She said her 'heart was with' the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern states in mixed groups in 1961, but she was not actually a member as has been reported.

'I supported what they did. People have incorrectly said I was a member which embarrasses me because I wasn't as good as they were,' she said.

Raymond Arsenault, the historian of the Freedom Rides, has put the total number who took part at 436. 

There is no question of Mrs Affleck's commitment to anti-racism. She said that she was involved in politically supporting Tougaloo College, the African-American college, in Madison County, near Jackson, Mississippi, and spent time there in 1965.

She joined in marches and campaigned for equality for people of all races as the unsavory treatment of black people became a national issue.

Tougaloo College had been established by New York–based Christian missionaries for the education of freed slaves and their offspring in 1869. 

Mrs Affleck, a retired teacher who taught at elite New York private school Brearley, and in public elementary schools, added: 'People like me take white privileges for granted and that is something we have to work out for ourselves.

Portrayal: What viewers saw as Prof Gates described Chris Affleck as taking part in 'Freedom Summer'. 'Ben's mom joined thousands of activists who headed to Mississippi to protest civil rights abuses...' Prog Gates narrated. The picture is her on the left, while on the right is a famous image of the Freedom Rides taken by Ted Polumbaum for Time magazine, not in Mississippi but at the start of a 1964 journey in Ohio to Mississippi

Portrayal: What viewers saw as Prof Gates described Chris Affleck as taking part in 'Freedom Summer'. 'Ben's mom joined thousands of activists who headed to Mississippi to protest civil rights abuses...' Prog Gates narrated. The picture is her on the left, while on the right is a famous image of the Freedom Rides taken by Ted Polumbaum for Time magazine, not in Mississippi but at the start of a 1964 journey in Ohio to Mississippi

Link: As pictures of three civil rights campaigners murdered in 1964  (from left, Andrew Goodman, James  Chaney, and Michael Schwerner) were shown on screen, Prof Gates called them 'three of Ben's mom's fellow activists'. In fact the was in the South the following year, she told Daily Mail Online

Link: As pictures of three civil rights campaigners murdered in 1964  (from left, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner) were shown on screen, Prof Gates called them 'three of Ben's mom's fellow activists'. In fact the was in the South the following year, she told Daily Mail Online

'When I think about the people of Ferguson and what has been going on there, it makes you realize I suppose…

'Racism is a terrible thing and I am absolutely against it in any form.'

PBS said that the program was already subject to a review of whether it breached editorial guidelines. 

Their statement suggests that the review will now also include assessing the accuracy of the show.

PBS said it was not responsible for speaking for Prof Gates - although last Friday when Daily Mail Online revealed that Affleck's slave ancestry had been censored, it had issued a statement from the Harvard academic in which he said he had full 'editorial control' of the program.

Prof Gates, as well as presenting the show, is director of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African American Research and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. He was educated at Yale and Cambridge in England. 

The day after Daily Mail Online broke the story, PBS put his program under review. 

Prof Gates's spokesman was unavailable for comment today. He employs the same show business public relations firm as Affleck. His assistant at Harvard also said he was unavailable.

It is unclear why PBS said Mrs Affleck was a Freedom Rider 'in 1964'. The assertion that she was a Freedom Rider has been made before - it is on Affleck's Wikipedia page, and has previously been reported by The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, among others, and the now defunct Talk magazine in 2000.

Today PBS updated the website for Finding Your Roots to say that she 'joined activists in 1964' - which is still at odds with what she told Daily Mail Online.

It also appeared to have removed the link to a full guide to the episode from the main Finding Your Roots part of its website. 

It is clear that Prof Gates still believed that she was active in civil rights in 1964 when he issued his statement through PBS last week which said:

'Ultimately, I maintain editorial control on all of my projects and, with my producers, decide what will make for the most compelling program. In the case of Mr. Affleck we focused on what we felt were the most interesting aspects of his ancestry -- including a Revolutionary War ancestor, a third great-grandfather who was an occult enthusiast, and his mother who marched for civil rights during the Freedom Summer of 1964.' 

The accuracy question is the latest problem to hit the show, which was produced for the publicly-funded broadcaster PBS. It was commissioned by member station WNET and made by Kunhardt McGee Productions and Inkwell Films in Association with Ark Media.

Gates is the executive producer alongside Peter Kunhardt, who was worked with Prof Gates on other shows including Faces of American with Henry Louis Gates Jr, and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which won an Emmy.

The third executive producer was Dyllan McGee, who has also worked with Prof Gates on Faces of America as well as other PBS documentary strands including Freedom: A History of US.

Affleck, a liberal campaign as well as an actor, had asked for a segment in a documentary about his ancestors' usage of black slaves to be cut from the final edit of the PBS program Finding Your Roots.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who was presenting the program and broke the news of Affleck's dark family past to him, edited them out at the actor's request.

Ben Affleck has apologized after he demanded information about a slave-owning relative be withheld from a PBS show about his ancestry

Ben Affleck has apologized after he demanded information about a slave-owning relative be withheld from a PBS show about his ancestry

Admission: How Ben Affleck finally came clean about one of his ancestors. Today's revelation about his New England ancestry raise questions over why he thought there was only one

Admission: How Ben Affleck finally came clean about one of his ancestors. Today's revelation about his New England ancestry raise questions over why he thought there was only one

Breaking silence: Affleck took to Facebook to issue his apology and say that he did not want 'a bad taste in my mouth' so chose to remove key facts from his family story

Breaking silence: Affleck took to Facebook to issue his apology and say that he did not want 'a bad taste in my mouth' so chose to remove key facts from his family story

Affleck,42, said sorry over his censoring and insisted that the discovery of his past left him feeling 'embarrassed' and with a 'bad taste in my mouth' and that he had been wrong.

The row has been damaging for Affleck, who supports a number of liberal causes, has a charity for aid to the Congo, and is a champion of the left.

His mother told Daily Mail Online she did not want to discuss his embarrassment at slave ownership in the family's past.

But she said the apology delivered by her son had 'made me very proud of him.'

His mother said: 'I wasn't surprised to find that my family had used black people as slaves. It makes sense.

'It was all on my side of the family because my parents were from Georgia and Mississippi and many rich white people from southern states would use people in this way.

Spotlight: The future of Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr as the host of the show is in the balance after PBS launched an investigation into whether its editorial code was breached. 

Spotlight: The future of Prof Henry Louis Gates Jr as the host of the show is in the balance after PBS launched an investigation into whether its editorial code was breached. 

Heroes: The Freedom Riders endured violence and attack after attack as they traveled through the South in 1961. The leading historian of the movement puts their number at 436. Unlike PBS's claim, Mrs Affleck was not among them 

Heroes: The Freedom Riders endured violence and attack after attack as they traveled through the South in 1961. The leading historian of the movement puts their number at 436. Unlike PBS's claim, Mrs Affleck was not among them 

Accused: Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, center, arrives at the Federal building between two FBI men as he is brought in to be arraigned before U.S. Commissioner on violating civil rights of three Freedom Summer workers in Meridian, Missisippi in October 1964. Mrs Affleck was not involved in Freedom Summer.

Accused: Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, center, arrives at the Federal building between two FBI men as he is brought in to be arraigned before U.S. Commissioner on violating civil rights of three Freedom Summer workers in Meridian, Missisippi in October 1964. Mrs Affleck was not involved in Freedom Summer.

'It went on like that if you were rich enough to have slaves and if you were not, you didn't have them.

'I know in my heart that it was wrong, but I had no exact knowledge until now. But I am not surprised or shocked, although it doesn't make you feel good at all.'

Since the embarrassment hit Affleck, Daily Mail Online has disclosed that he has at least three ancestors who owned slaves including a wealthy landowner who bought a young boy who he appears to have set to work in his tanning business.

The Batman star's distant family can be traced to Connecticut and in 1728 they paid 80 pounds for a slave called Tobe who they kept until he was grown up.

The bill of sale refers to Tobe as a 'negro boy' which the previous owner 'sold as my proper estate'.

Tobe's owner was called Nathaniel Stanley and was known as a smart man of 'respected piety and evangelical sentiments' - but that did not stop him keeping slaves.

Affleck's other slave owning ancestors were a man in Georgia and an Irish farmer from New Jersey who owned eight slaves.

FREEDOM RIDERS: HEROES OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Freedom Rides of 1961 electrified the country in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on public buses. 

On May 4 1961, 13 men and women, a mix of race and age, set out from Washington DC for the South in two buses, to test whether the ruling was being followed.

They were threatened, harassed and arrested. Klansmen awaited the arrival, mobs attacked the bus in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Rock Hill, South Carolina, John Lewis, now a Congressman from Georgia, and two others were beaten. 

More Freedom Riders followed in their wake that summer despite the president - John F Kennedy - and his brother Robert, the attorney-general, calling them 'unpatriotic' and urging a 'cooling off period'.

But their protest worked - interstate buses and trains were desegregated, along with waiting rooms and other facilities in November - and perhaps more importantly inspired more and more civil rights activism.

The original 13 Riders became heroes of the movement.

Raymond Arsenault, the historian whose work Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice is seen as the most important study, described it as 'the first unambiguous victory' for civil rights'.

He said in 2011 in an interview with Oprah that there were 436 Freedom Riders in all.

None of these details were shown in the episode of Finding Your Roots which featured Affleck after host Henry Louis Gates Jr edited them out, leaked Sony emails revealed. 

Affleck has now apologized for asking Gates to make the changes. Gates has already been described by one commentator as 'diminished' by the disclosures.

The Oscar-winning actor said in a post on Facebook that the discovery of his past left him feeling 'embarrassed' and with a 'bad taste in my mouth' - but that he was wrong to censor it.

The row has been damaging for Affleck, who supports a number of liberal causes, has a charity for aid to the Congo, and is a champion of the left.

It became public when Daily Mail Online disclosed that hacked emails from Sony revealed a conversation between Gates and Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, over what the TV host called a 'dilemma'.

Affleck himself has named the member of his family who was a slave owner who was supposed to feature in the show.

He tweeted: 'Lots of people have been asking who the guy was. His name was Benjamin Cole - lived in Georgia on my Mom's side about six generations back.' 

According to Gawker Cole was Affleck's third great grandfather who was wealthy, influential and the sheriff of his county in Savannah, Georgia.

A transcript of the show before it was edited says that Cole had 25 slaves and put him in the 'Southern Elite'; fewer than 10 per cent of people owned such a number of slaves.

The findings were revealed by examining the 1850 Census in Georgia.

According to the transcript, Affleck says to Gates: 'God. It gives me kind of a sagging feeling to see, uh, a biological relationship to that.

'But, you know, there it is, part of our history.'

The PBS internal review is likely to determine if Gates told PBS or WNET, the member station which oversaw the production of the show, what he was doing, and who at the network knew.

PBS has claimed that it was first notified of the issue on Friday, when a reporter from Daily Mail Online contacted them.

The network's ombudsman Mike Getler has sharply criticized Gates and said that 'any serious program about genealogy, especially dealing with celebrities, cannot leave out a slave-owning ancestor'.

However, the affair has also called into question the future Prof Gates on the show.

Until now he had been a Harvard University academic best known for the 'beer summit' organized by President Obama when a policeman tried to arrest him because of a 911 call about men breaking and entering a home - which was in fact Prof Gates' own home.

The arrest became the center of a debate on racial profiling, and the African-American academic and the policeman were invited to the White House to discuss the arrest and its fallout over a beer.

THE EMAILS WHICH REVEALED BEN AFFLECK'S SHAME AT SLAVERY ROOTS

Gates

By the way, I need your advice: I'm on a flight to L.A. for the TCA Press Tour. We launch season two of Finding Your Roots tomorrow at noon, and four celebrities, including Nas, are showing up. Here's my dilemma: confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors--the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He's a megastar. What do we do?

Lynton

On the doc the big question is who knows that the material is in the doc and is being taken out. I would take it out if no one knows, but if it gets out that you are editing the material based on this kind of sensitivity then it gets tricky. Again, all things being equal I would definitely take it out.

Gates

All my producers would know; his PR agency the same as mine, and everyone there has been involved trying to resolve this; my agent at CAA knows. And PBS would know. To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman.

Lynton

then it is tricky because it may get out that you made the change and it comes down to editorial integrity. We can talk when you land.

Gates

Will call. It would embarrass him and compromise our integrity. I think he is getting very bad advice. I've offered to fly to Detroit, where he is filming, to talk it through.

Lynton

Yeah,, the past is the past…..

Gates

And he wasn't even a bad guy. We don't demonize him at all. Now Anderson Cooper's ancestor was a real s.o.b.; one of his slaves actually murdered him. Of course, the slave was promptly hanged. And Anderson didn't miss a beat about that. Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.

Lynton

Yes, bad idea.

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