If Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for president 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.
