DeWayne Wickham: Question of race pervades presidential history
[DeWayne Wickham is a columnist for Gannett News Service. His e-mail address is DeWayneWickham@aol.com.]
If Barack Obama manages to win the presidency in 2008, the conventional wisdom goes, he’ll become this nation’s first black president.
Most recently, that distinction was bestowed on a white man — Bill Clinton — by novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in a 1998 article she wrote for The New Yorker.
Clinton was “blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected (president) in our children’s lifetime,” Morrison wrote.
Her words drew fire from blacks angered by Clinton’s support of welfare reform and his failure to stop the black-on-black genocide in Rwanda. And it caused more than a few of Clinton’s white political enemies to sneer at the suggestion that he could be viewed so favorably by blacks, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency.
A year before his death in 1966, journalist and historian J.A. Rogers wrote a small book called “The Five Negro Presidents,” in which he argued that five men with “Negro ancestry” had been elected president. Rogers names four of them — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Warren Harding. The fifth one he only alludes to, saying “there seems to be no published research on his ancestry.”
In the case of the others, Rogers offers mostly anecdotal evidence. For example, he points to a passage in Thomas Hazard’s book, “The Johnny-Cake Papers,” as evidence that Jefferson had black blood coursing through his veins.
In the book, Hazard recounts how a “veracious stump orator” described Jefferson during the 1800 presidential campaign as “nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”
Rogers offers similarly obscure evidence to support the idea that Jackson and Lincoln had at least one parent with black blood.
The case for Harding being of black ancestry — which Rogers lays out in greater detail — is more familiar to historians, even if it’s not terribly persuasive. His father was said to have been a mulatto. During the 1920 presidential campaign, one opponent claimed that Harding’s nomination was a plot to achieve black domination of the United States.
The assertion that Harding may have been black was fueled by a book written by William Estabrook Chancellor, a professor at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Estabrook said people in Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio, had given him affidavits in which they said the 29th president had lived as a black early in his life.
Given the state of miscegenation in this country during its first century, it’s not likely anyone could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any of these men had black ancestry.
It’s also unlikely there will be great demand for plucking a hair from one of their corpses to do DNA testing. But I suspect there’s a good chance that, even if none of these particular presidents had a bloodline tracing back to Africa, some other president did.
“The fact that these five presidents could be Caucasian to some and Negro to others ... shows how ridiculous is this burning question of race,” Rogers said in summing up his book....
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If Barack Obama manages to win the presidency in 2008, the conventional wisdom goes, he’ll become this nation’s first black president.
Most recently, that distinction was bestowed on a white man — Bill Clinton — by novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in a 1998 article she wrote for The New Yorker.
Clinton was “blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected (president) in our children’s lifetime,” Morrison wrote.
Her words drew fire from blacks angered by Clinton’s support of welfare reform and his failure to stop the black-on-black genocide in Rwanda. And it caused more than a few of Clinton’s white political enemies to sneer at the suggestion that he could be viewed so favorably by blacks, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency.
A year before his death in 1966, journalist and historian J.A. Rogers wrote a small book called “The Five Negro Presidents,” in which he argued that five men with “Negro ancestry” had been elected president. Rogers names four of them — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Warren Harding. The fifth one he only alludes to, saying “there seems to be no published research on his ancestry.”
In the case of the others, Rogers offers mostly anecdotal evidence. For example, he points to a passage in Thomas Hazard’s book, “The Johnny-Cake Papers,” as evidence that Jefferson had black blood coursing through his veins.
In the book, Hazard recounts how a “veracious stump orator” described Jefferson during the 1800 presidential campaign as “nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”
Rogers offers similarly obscure evidence to support the idea that Jackson and Lincoln had at least one parent with black blood.
The case for Harding being of black ancestry — which Rogers lays out in greater detail — is more familiar to historians, even if it’s not terribly persuasive. His father was said to have been a mulatto. During the 1920 presidential campaign, one opponent claimed that Harding’s nomination was a plot to achieve black domination of the United States.
The assertion that Harding may have been black was fueled by a book written by William Estabrook Chancellor, a professor at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Estabrook said people in Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio, had given him affidavits in which they said the 29th president had lived as a black early in his life.
Given the state of miscegenation in this country during its first century, it’s not likely anyone could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any of these men had black ancestry.
It’s also unlikely there will be great demand for plucking a hair from one of their corpses to do DNA testing. But I suspect there’s a good chance that, even if none of these particular presidents had a bloodline tracing back to Africa, some other president did.
“The fact that these five presidents could be Caucasian to some and Negro to others ... shows how ridiculous is this burning question of race,” Rogers said in summing up his book....