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 18 Nov Barack Obama ‘may not be the first black USA President’
Sen. Barack Obama (pictured) may the sixth, not the first black man to occupy the oval office when he is sworn in next NJanuary, according to three black historians whose work to uncover the racial backgrounds of U.S. presidents has been largely ignored until now.
Black male historians have written extensively that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower had black ancestors, according to historians Joel A. Rodgers, Dr. Leroy Vaughn, and Dr. Auset Bakhufu.
Black historians, however, were not the first to write about the five presidents' racially mixed families. White historians and political opponents also wrote about the men's black ancestors, but the books were either destroyed, went out of print or are hard to find.
A common theme associated with the earlier black presidents is that they all passed for white, sometimes destroying family photographs and letters, to hide their racial backgrounds.
Sen. Obama cannot obviously pass for white because of his dark skin colour. Obama also makes it clear he is the son of a Kenyan economist and white female anthropologist.
Interracial relationships between black women and white men explain the racial backgrounds of some of the presidents, but not all. According to historians, Andrew Jackson, the USA’s seventh's president, was the son of a black man and an Irish woman,.
Interracial relationships between black men and Native American women also produced racially mixed offspring.
Rodgers, who died in 1966, wrote the book The Five Black Presidents, and Dr. Vaughn devotes a chapter to the five black presidents in his Black People and Their Place in World History. Rogers and Vaughn agree Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge had black ancestors.
Dr. Auset Bakhufu, author of The Six Black Presidents Black Blood: White Masks includes Eisenhower.
The strongest case for a president with black ancestry is Harding, the 29th president who served in office from 1921 to 1923.
White historians claim Harding was of English and Dutch ancestry, but in truth both his parents were black. Harding's black ancestors escaped from the South to the North via the Underground Railroad, according to the book Warren G. Harding, U.S. President 29: Death By Blackness, by Marsha Stewart, a black woman, who says she is a Harding descendent.
Historians bolster Harding's black ancestral background by noting where he attended college.
Harding graduated from Iberia College, a school in Iberia, Ohio, founded to educate fugitive slaves, according to historians. Iberia College has been renamed Ohio Central College. When Republicans asked Harding to deny his "Negro" Harding said, "How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence."
William Chancellor, a white professor of economics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote about Harding's black ancestry in the 1923 book Warren Gamaliel Harding: President of the United States.
Chancellor called Harding "our first Negro president," and he wrote that Warren, his brother and sisters were reared and treated like "colored people." He also accused Harding of using makeup to lighten his facial complexion.
As soon as Harry M. Daugherty, Harding's attorney general, learned of the book, justice department officials seized all of the copies. Stewart says only three copies now exist. The New York Public Library owns a copy; the Princeton University Library owns one as does the library of the Ohio Historical Society, she adds.
Jackson was the nation's seventh president. He served from 1829 to 1837. Dr. Vaughn cites an article published in the Virginia Magazine of History that Jackson's oldest brother was sold into slavery.
Another account of Jackson's brother being sold into slavery is published in the 1960 book Ordeal of the Presidency by David Coyle. Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, who served from 1801 to 1809, was the son of an Indian woman and a mulatto father, according to the 1867 book The Johnny Cake Papers, by Thomas Hazard.
Another author Samuel Sloan wrote that Jefferson destroyed all of the papers, portraits and personal effects of his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, when she died on March 31, 1776. He even wrote letters to everyone who had received a letter from his mother to ask that they return them, Sloan writes in his book The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson.
Abraham Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, was the illegitimate son of an African man, Rodgers quotes Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Lincoln's mother, as saying. Abraham Lincoln was very dark skinned and had coarse hair, Rodgers writes.
Historians maintain that Thomas Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's father, but William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, disputes that assumption. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Herndon contacted everyone who knew Lincoln and documented his life. According to the book The Hidden Lincoln, From The Letters And Papers Of William H. Herndon, Herndon argued that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln's father because Thomas Lincoln was sterile from childhood mumps.
Doctors later castrated Thomas Lincoln, Herndon wrote in his letters. The Hidden Lincoln was published in 1938. Emanuel Hertz compiled the writings. Calvin Coolidge, the USA’s 30th president, admitted that his mother, Victoria Josephine Moor Coolidge, was dark because she was of mixed Indian ancestry. Coolidge was a native of Plymouth, Windsor County, Vermont. By the 1800, New England Indians were not pure because so many of them intermarried with blacks, says Dr. Bakhufu.
Further, he adds, Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor," and the name "Moor" was given to all black people in Europe as Negro had been given to all black people in the United States.
Dr. Bakhufu includes on his list of presidents with black ancestry, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the nation's 34th president. President Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, was rumoured to have black ancestry.
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