By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi 2. President Andrew Jackson President Andrew Jackson, fondly called Old Hickor...
By
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
2.
President Andrew Jackson
President Andrew Jackson, fondly called Old Hickory,
was America’s seventh president. African-American historian J. A. Rogers who
wrote The Five Negro Presidents: According to what White People Said They Were claimed
that President Jackson’s putative father, Andrew Jackson Sr., actually died
over a year before President Jackson was born and therefore couldn’t be his
biological father. He further claimed that upon the death of Jackson Sr., the
president’s mother moved to a farm where there were African slaves. One of the
slaves, Rogers claims, sired President Andrew Jackson.
This story stretches my credulity to the limit. Apart
from the fact that the story is of questionable authenticity, there is nothing
in President Jackson’s physical features to suggest an immediate African
stemma, although appearances can be deceiving.
In Black People and Their Place in History, Leroy Vaughn takes claims of the
alleged part-African parentage of Andrew Jackson even higher. He cites what he
says was an article written in the 29th volume of The Virginia Magazine of History which allegedly stated that
Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a black man. The magazine
also allegedly said Jackson’s oldest brother had been sold as a slave because
of his more obvious African features.
Other Black American authors cite David Coyle's 1960
book titled Ordeal of the Presidency
as having provided evidence that Jackson’s brother was sold into slavery.
3.
President Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, America’s 16th president, served
between 1861 and 1865. He is most remembered for saving the Union during the
American Civil War and for emancipating African slaves with his Emancipation
Proclamation.
J. A. Rogers cites Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, as
having once allegedly confessed that Abraham Lincoln was the love child from
her affairs with an African man. No independent documentary evidence has been
adduced to authenticate the alleged quotation from President Lincoln’s mother.
But other Black American authors eager to prove that
Lincoln was “black” reference another book titled The Hidden Lincoln written by a certain William Herndon, Lincoln's
alleged law partner, which purportedly averred that Lincoln had a darker than
normal white skin, thick negroid hair, and that his mother was Ethiopian. The
author is also alleged to have argued that Thomas Lincoln could not have been
Abraham Lincoln's father because he was barren from childhood mumps and was
later emasculated.
Another indication of the acknowledgement of his
“blackness,” according to the authors, was that Lincoln’s political opponents
allegedly made newspaper drawings that caricatured him as an African American,
and derisively labeled him “Abraham Africanus the First.” That might have been
because he was seen as sympathetic to African Americans during the Civil War.
4.
President Warren Harding
Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the United
States who served between 1921 and 1923, is probably the only truly previous
“black” president of the United States, if the white historian William
Estabrook Chancellor was correct. And he probably was, given the unusually
heightened frenzy and flurries of denials—and endorsements—that his 1920 book about the hidden black African ancestry of President Harding
generated.
Note that I am using the word “black” in its
peculiarly American context, which is scandalously hidebound, hopelessly
essentialist and, yes, notoriously out of step with commonsense notions of
“blackness” worldwide. The American notion of blackness—encapsulated in the
so-called one-drop rule, which I briefly discussed in the first part of this article—conceives of blackness
as an inerasable genetic stain, so that the remotest ancestral connection with
Black Africa defines one as black. This preposterous logic would make many
Europeans “black” since recent DNA evidence suggests that many Western and
Southern Europeans have vestiges of African blood in them.
Well,
Chancellor’s book, which was published while Harding was alive, declared that
Harding’s great grandmother was an African-American. Several historical sources
said all but five copies of the book were bought and burned by Harding’s
supporters and by agents of the U.S. Justice Department. Chancellor also lost
his job as a professor of politics and economics at Worcester College in the
state of Ohio, where Harding hailed from.
Although the book was decidedly a politically
motivated screed designed to lower Harding’s standing in White America (in
1920s America, to be called black was a political death sentence), it contained
treasure troves of circumstantial evidence that were, and still are, difficult
to dismiss with a shrug.
Chancellor, for instance, proved that Harding was
educated at Iberia College, a school specifically designed to train runaway
slaves. It is also said that Harding’s in-law strongly disapproved of his
daughter’s marriage to Harding because the in-law reportedly didn’t want his
bloodline to be blemished with what he considered baseborn black African
ancestry.
Similarly, aged
residents of President Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio, had sworn affidavits
that Elizabeth Madison, Harding’s great grandmother, was African American. And
African-American historians claim that Harding himself was never forceful and
categorical in his denials of his black African ancestry.
According to African-American historian J.A. Rogers,
when leaders of the Republican Party, Harding’s party, called on him to refute
allegations that he was a closet "Negro," he reportedly said,
"How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped
the fence?"
Significantly, unlike the previous American presidents
mentioned here, there is demonstrable proof that Harding and his immediate
ancestors actually had to confront and live with rumors of their alleged
suppressed African ancestry. In fact, President Harding’s official biographer,
Francis Russell, devoted several pages to this issue in his 1968 book titled The Shadow of Blooming Grove.
He said the official explanation by the Harding family
of the whispering campaign alleging that his family members were “passing” for
white when they were actually black was this: Harding’s
great-great-grandfather, Amos Harding, once caught and exposed a man who was
cutting down his neighbor’s apple trees, and that the man initiated the gossip
in retribution. Interestingly, Russell himself dismissed this explanation as
rather wishy-washy and improbable.
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