Obama may become America's seventh black president

 


        Now that Bill Clinton has forever demolished the curious notion that he was the first black president, it may be that there actually were six black commander-in-chiefs before him.
    Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower may have all had black ancestors, according to a report in the North Star News.
    The newspaper quotes black historians who researched the ancestry of our presidents. Early on in American history, the “one-drop rule” was instituted. That meant if one drop of Negro blood could be traced back in a person’s ancestry, then no matter how white they looked, no matter how white they had been raised, no matter what, they were black.
    Of course, the reality was just the opposition. Enslaved African women were getting equal doses of white blood for their offspring when their white slave masters and overseers routinely raped them. Those half-white children were born into slavery and were in turn impregnated by white masters and overseers. The offspring of the mulattoes and their white masters were called quadroons. Another white master dip in that genetic pool a generation later produced octoroons.  Somewhere along that racial recession, those kind of black people started becoming white. They escaped the plantation, moved elsewhere and blended into the dominant white society.
    Following that historical racial development, according to the North Star News, one historian says Dwight Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, was black.
    The painting above by my wife, artist Joyce Owens, is of Louise Evans, a former slave from North Carolina who was interviewed and photographed during the WPA era. You wouldn’t know the woman was black to look at her. There are many more of you out there. Applying the one-drop rule, a fourth of all Americans who think they are white may, in fact, be black.
    Now back to our white/black presidents. Here’s how the April-May 2008 North Star News begins:

Barack Obama May Become The Seventh
Not The First, Black President

If Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for preside nt and goes on to win the White House, he would be the seventh, not the first black man to occupy the oval office, 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. These historians are 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 color. Obama 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.
          Sexual relationships between black men and white women have produced offspring. Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh's president, was the son of a black man and an Irish woman, according to historians.
          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.
          Despite author Toni Morrison's 1998 New Yorker magazine article that claims Bill Clinton is the nation's first black president because of his womanizing and frequenting McDonald's restaurants, Clinton is not listed.

    To read the rest of the article at northstarnews.com, click here.

Comments

[Frederick Lowe]

Monroe, thanks for publishing in your blog NorthStar's story about the black presidents.
Three weeks or four weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine published an article about Warren G. Harding being nation's first black president. For all the newspaper’s available resources, The New York Times' article was not well-written or well- reported.
For example, the writer failed to mention that Harding attended an Ohio college opened for the sole purpose of educating fugitive slaves.
Harding also admitted to interviewers that some of his ancestors might have been black.
As far as Dwight Eisenhower, or Ike, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city's largest newspaper, recently published a front-page article reporting that Eisenhower's mother was black.
It's clear the press never photographed her visiting the White House when her son was president. That is my speculation. I am not sure she did; she may have stayed away.
But I think it’s weird. I have seen so many photographs of John F. Kennedy’s mother; Richard Nixon’s mother; Harry Truman’s mother; and even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother, but only one of Ike’s mother.
Several Massachusetts newspapers also have published similar stories about Ike's racial background.
Eisenhower was an interesting president.
He was the second president—Ulysses Grant was the first-- to send federal troops to the South to protect blacks from white-racist mobs.
Ike sent troops to Little Rock, Ark., to aid blacks attending Central High School. He also pushed through Congress a significant civil rights bill that has been ignored.
A year ago, I read "King of the Cats," Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s biography.
Powell, a Democrat, supported Ike, a Republican, over Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat.
Powell accused Stevenson of being a racist. I am sure Powell said this to explain to constituents why he was breaking with his own party over Stevenson. He also may have seen something--a gesture, a reference--Ike made that told Powell something was very different about this president's background.
Whites must be really upset to learn that Ike, the supreme commander of the allied forces during World War 2, was a black man.
Here is a postscript.
Julie Nixon Eisenhower is a strong supporter of Barack Obama. She has donated the $2,500 maximum to Obama's campaign and has hit the campaign trail for him.
Finally, I believe the stories about some of our presidents' racial backgrounds because there was a shortage of white women in the South and West.
As a result, there was a lot of intermarriage between blacks, whites and Native Americans.
Blacks moved in large numbers to Kansas, where Ike was born and raised, to escape segregation in the South after the Civil War. I have read book excerpts about campaigns to encourage blacks to move to Kansas–Frederick H. Lowe, founder and editor of The NorthStar News (www.thenorthstarnews.com/)