Perhaps the biggest reason for the record-setting enthusiasm of the 2008 presidential election is that Americans knew it would be electing its first Black president, Barack Obama. That enthusiasm only sharply contrasts how dreadfully unexcited we are as a collective for the upcoming presidential election between two white dudes nearing Depends age.
But, let some folks tell it, Obama wasn’t the first Black president – he was just the most obvious.
Theories have swirled for the better part of two centuries regarding whether some U.S. presidents – including Founding Fathers – had some surreptitious Black ancestry while running a country that, during their eras, didn’t even have to pretend that they found us subhuman.
Many of these allegations fall in the realm of conspiracy theory and have been debunked by historians. However, DNA testing is a relatively recent science while Black folks “jumping the fence” in order to pass for white has been a thing for centuries. Could it be possible that some of these presidents were “passing” or their parents or grandparents had passed for white during the height of racial viciousness?
The topic is salacious enough that there exist books, essays, New York Times articles and NPR discussions on whether America already had a Black president before Obama. In the 1990s, pamphlets entitled “The Five Negro Presidents” and “The Six Black Presidents” were passed around and read by Black high school and college students everywhere.
So, strap on your tinfoil hat and consider this crop of dead presidents who just might’ve successfully dodged the one-drop Rule to run the free world.
Abraham Lincoln
Considering his push to abolish chattel slavery, Lincoln spent ample time in the crosshairs of his political opponents. Much of the speculation about his ancestry focuses on his complexion and his very dark hair. While Lincoln did indeed look like he could’ve been an adult version of the rapper Logic, no empirical evidence of his Blackness has ever been proven.
There is, however, an amusing yarn about some dude of questionable ancestry publicly claiming that he was Lincoln’s real daddy, leading his presumed real daddy Thomas Lincoln to fight him — and bite off his nose! It’s like an episode of Maury but with petticoats.
Calvin Coolidge
As far as long-dead presidents go, our 30th had a surprisingly enlightened (for the time) approach toward Black folks: On his last day in office in 1929, Coolidge signed Public Resolution 107, which authorized the creation of a monument that would recognize the “Negro’s” contributions to ‘Murica.
Thing is, Coolidge’s mother Victoria Moor (as in what-Europeans-called-North-Africans Moor) – was allegedly darker because she was of mixed-Indian ancestry. Though I’m sure “dark” in the early 20th century was, like, Halsey.
Warren G. Harding
Rumors about Harding’s race persisted since he was a boy and possibly the rumors can even be traced back to a comment by his great-great grandfather, according to a New York Times article. Regardless, these rumors hit a feverish pitch when racist “historian” William Estabrook Chancellor played dirty in the early 1920s — back when it was the Democrats on that bullshit — writing a book suggesting that Harding, a liberal Republican, was of mixed-race ancestry. Chancellor used the allegations to taint Harding during his presidential run, which occurred in the middle of Jim Crow and during the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Harding got the last laugh, evoking the “G” in his name by running Chancellor out of the country and having most copies of his book burned.
Dwight Eisenhower
Someone somewhere said that Ida Stover was an orphaned mulatto woman who married David Jacob Eisenhower, a German immigrant with whom she had six sons, including our 34th president.
According to Snopes, this is unproven – which does not not mean he wasn’t, in part, one of us. But actual historians have deemed Eisenhower’s parents German and Swiss…or as white as one can possibly get without serving as camouflage for drywall.
Thomas Jefferson
The master enslaver himself is known to have had children with slave Sally Hemings. But was his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, of mixed ancestry? Scholars shoot this belief down as the nasty work of his race-baiting opponents who used the ultimate tool against him: Dare suggest that Jefferson be part-Black at a time when weren’t exactly stuntin’ in the chains we wore.