On August 25th, 2008, IF Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) receives the nomination of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, he will step to the podium, in a prime-time televised speech t accept the nomination. The date is not being lost on historians, particularly civil rights movement historians, as it will be the 45th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Had a Dream”  speech. We can be assured that Obama will make more than one reference to Rev. King.

And the hype will ensue leading to the general election on November 4th, with the eye on the 1st Black President possibility. But, lets put Barack Obama into his own perspective AS WELL AS a historical perspective.

First, as for Obama himself. Barack Obama Jr. is not black. He is multi-racial. In an earlier time, he would be a mullato, and would have been discriminated against by the black race as much if not more than the Caucasians. Realistically, Obama is more white than black, if one wants to be specific. Though his “alleged” birth certificate lists his father as “African”, Barack Obama Sr.’s birth record actually lists him as Arab. So we can just as easily say Obama would be our first Arab-American President, if elected.

From a historical perspective, there is a vast amount of information regarding the black lineage of several of our forefathers. In the book “Black People and Their Place In World History”, Dr. Leroy Vaughn has a chapter entitled “Five Black Presidents.”

Thomas Jefferson	Andrew Jackson	Abraham Lincoln
Warren Harding	Calvin Coolidge

The following is the excerpt of the chapter:

 Joel A. Rogers and Dr. Auset Bakhufu have both written books documenting that at least five former presidents of the United States had Black people among their ancestors. If one considers the fact that European men far outnumbered European women during the founding of this country, and that the rape and impregnation of an African female slave was not considered a crime, it is even more surprising that these two authors could not document Black ancestors among an ever larger number of former presidents. The president’s names include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge.

The best case for Black ancestry is against Warren G. Harding, our 29th president from 1921 until 1923. Harding himself never denied his ancestry. When Republican leaders called on Harding to deny the “Negro” history, he said, “How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence.” William Chancellor, a White professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy and identified Black ancestors among both parents of President Harding. Justice Department agents allegedly bought and destroyed all copies of this book. Chancellor also said that Harding’s only academic credentials included education at Iberia College, which was founded in order to educate fugitive slaves.

 

Andrew Jackson was our 7th president from 1829 to 1837. The Virginia Magazine of History Volume 29 says that Jackson was the son of a White woman from Ireland who had intermarried with a Negro. The magazine also said that his eldest brother had been sold as a slave in Carolina. Joel Rogers says that Andrew Jackson Sr. died long before President Andrew Jackson Jr. was born. He says the president’s mother then went to live on the Crawford farm where there were Negro slaves and that one of these men was Andrew Jr’s father. Another account of the “brother sold into slavery” story can be found in David Coyle’s book entitled “Ordeal of the Presidency” (1960).

Thomas Jefferson was our 3rd president from 1801 to 1809. The chief attack on Jefferson was in a book written by Thomas Hazard in 1867 called “The Johnny Cake Papers.” Hazard interviewed Paris Gardiner, who said he was present during the 1796 presidential campaign, when one speaker states that Thomas Jefferson was “a mean-spirited son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father.” In his book entitled “The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson,” 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 every person who had ever received a letter from his mother, asking them to return that letter. Sloan says, “There is something strange and even psychopathic about the lengths to which Thomas Jefferson went to destroy all remembrances of his mother, while saving over 18,000 copies of his own letters and other documents for posterity.” One must ask, “What is it he was trying to hide?”

Abraham Lincoln was our 16th president from 1861 to 1865. J. A. Rogers quotes Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, as saying that Abraham Lincoln was the illegitimate son of an African man. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, said that Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and that his mother was from an Ethiopian tribe. In Herndon’s book entitled “The Hidden Lincoln” he says that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln’s father because he was sterile from childhood mumps and was later castrated. Lincoln’s presidential opponents made cartoon drawings depicting him as a Negro and nicknamed him “Abraham Africanus the First.”

Calvin Coolidge was our 30th president, and he succeeded Warren Harding. He proudly admitted that his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. However, Dr. Bakhufu says that by 1800 the New England Indian was hardly any longer pure Indian, because they had mixed so often with Blacks. Calvin Coolidge’s mother’s maiden name was “Moor.” In Europe the name “Moor” was given to all Black people just as the name Negro was used in America.

All of the presidents mentioned were able to pass for White and never acknowledged their Black ancestry. Millions of other children who were descendants of former slaves have also been able to pass for White. American society has had so much interracial mixing that books such as “The Bell Curve”, discussing IQ evaluations based solely on race, are totally unrealistic.

Thus, if Obama is campaigning as the “Candidate of Change”, let’s make sure he changes the commentary, and takes “Race” out of the Presidential race. Remember, despite the claims that Bill Clinton threw down the race card in South Carolina (another mutated news blurb), it is Barack Obama who has consistently played the race card…. “and did I tell you I was black!” (Fl. speech 6/20/08)

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