Black People and Their Place in History

{{Infobox Book
| name = Black People and Their Place in History
| image =
| image_caption =
| author = Leroy Vaughn
| country = [[USA]]
| language = [[English language|English]]
| publisher = Lulu.com
| release_date = 2001
| english_release_date =
| media_type = Hardback
| pages = 231
| isbn = 1411688759
}}

'''''Black People and Their Place in History''''' is a 2001 book by [[ophthalmologist]] and amateur historian Leroy William Vaughn. He claims that several United States presidents had [[African]] ancestry.<ref name=chideya>{{cite news |first=Farai |last=Chideya |authorlink=Farai Chideya |coauthors= |title=Has America Already Had a Black President? |url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91845732 |quote=This fall, America could elect its first black president, but according to some, the country has already had a black commander-in-chief. Over time, rumormongers and amateur historians have claimed that Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, and Abraham Lincoln had black lineage. |work=[[National Public Radio]] |date=June 24, 2008 |accessdate=2009-01-20 }}</ref><ref name="Hussain">{{cite news |first=Aysha |last=Hussain |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=Obama Won't Be First Black President |url=http://www.diversityinc.com/public/1461print.cfm?StartRow=1&id=33 |quote=Were there other "black" presidents? Some historians have reason to believe people don't really understand the genealogy of past U.S. Presidents. Research shows at least five U.S. presidents had black ancestors and Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, was considered the first black president, according to historian Leroy Vaughn, author of ''Black People and Their Place in World History''. Vaughn's research shows Jefferson was not the only former black U.S. president. Who were the others? Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But why was this unknown? How were they elected president? All five of these presidents never acknowledged their black ancestry. |work=Diversity |date=2008 |accessdate=2009-01-20 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.computerhealth.org/ebook/ |title=Black People & Their Place In World History |accessdate=2009-01-29 |quote=Leroy William Vaughn M.D., M.B.A. is not only one of the world’s renowned ophthalmologists, but also one of the leading authorities on Black history," Foreword by Brad Pye, Jr., sports columnist for the ''Los Angeles Watts Times''.|publisher=Computer Health }}</ref>

Vaughn based his claims on amateur historian J. A. Rogers' self-published 1965 pamphlet and the work of Auset Bakhufu.<ref name=pg>{{cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=Racial heritage of six former presidents is questioned |url=http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08036/854713-51.stm |quote=Aysha Hussain cited Los Angeles historian Dr. Leroy Vaughn's 2001 book "Black People and Their Place in History" as the main source for her February 2007 article in Diversity Inc. magazine "Obama Wouldn't Be First Black President." ... "Virtually, all we know came from J.A. Rogers," said Dr. Vaughn, who based his chapter on black presidents on Mr. Rogers' research and that of Dr. Auset Bakhufu. Dr. Bakhufu's 1993 book "The Six Black Presidents Black Blood: White Masks" includes Eisenhower. |work=[[Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]] |date=February 5, 2008 |accessdate=2009-01-21 }}</ref>

Vaughn claims African-American ancestry of several American presidents, among other topics in history, without providing substantive documentation. While the book has a bibliography, it includes no footnotes. Such claims about this list of presidents are included among those of "rumormongers".<ref name=chideya>{{cite news |first=Farai |last=Chideya |authorlink=Farai Chideya |coauthors= |title=Has America Already Had a Black President? |url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91845732 |quote=This fall, America could elect its first black president, but according to some, the country has already had a black commander-in-chief. Over time, rumormongers and amateur historians have claimed that Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, and Abraham Lincoln had black lineage. |work=[[National Public Radio]] |date=June 24, 2008 |accessdate=2009-01-20 }}</ref>

==Subjects==
*[[Thomas Jefferson]] - Vaughn says, "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." (p.142)<ref>{{cite book |author=Leroy William Vaughn |coauthors= |title=Black People and Their Place in History |year=2002 |publisher=Lulu.com |quote= | url= |isbn=0-9715920-0-4}}</ref> Vaughn also quoted Samuel Sloan's statement that there was "something strange" about Thomas Jefferson's reportedly destroying papers and personal effects of his mother [[Jane Randolph Jefferson]] after her death. That is the extent of his evidence.

The Monticello Foundation, which owns and operates [[Monticello]], characterizes Jefferson's parents this way: "His father Peter Jefferson was a successful planter and surveyor and his mother Jane Randolph a member of one of Virginia's most distinguished families."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/biography.html |title=Brief Biography of Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826)|accessdate=2009-01-31 |quote= |publisher=Monticello Foundation}}</ref> Further, they describe the quote in ''The Johnny Cake Papers'' as one frequently repeated, but attributed in written sources to the 1800 rather than the 1796 election campaign and clearly one made by political opponents. ''The Johnny Cake Papers'' were a collection of folk tales published in 1879, not 1867, and only one commented on Jefferson. The Foundation states:

<blockquote>To date we have not found this quotation in any sources contemporary to the election of 1800. Its earliest known appearance in print is actually in a collection of New England folk tales, ''The Johnny-Cake Papers''. First published in 1879, the stories told date in many cases back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, while others are thought to be even older. The reference in question appears in the "Seventeenth Baking," in which a "most veracious stump orator from [[Providence, Rhode Island|Providence]]" spoke expansively on the achievements of [president] [[John Adams]],

*"...the profound and fearless patriot and full-blooded [[Yankee]], [who] exceeded in every possible respect his competitor, Tom Jefferson, for the Presidency, who, to make the best of him, was nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was raised, wholly on hoe-cake (made of course-ground Southern corn), bacon, and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog, for which abominable reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French in Paris, to whom there could be no question he would sell his country at the first offer made to him cash down, should he be elected to fill the Presidential chair."

*Dixon Wecter, in his essay "Thomas Jefferson, The Gentle Radical," discusses various portrayals of Jefferson by his political enemies, and mentions that "the Jonnycake [sic] Papers later burlesqued such caricatures..."</blockquote><ref>{{cite web |url=http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/%22Son_of_a_half-breed_Indian_squaw...%22 |title="Son of a half-breed Indian squaw... |accessdate=2009-01-31 |quote= |publisher=Monticello Foundation}}</ref>

*[[Andrew Jackson]]'s father is claimed to be a "light-skinned slave." Vaughn may have followed the error of another historian's using a source which is a slave narrative of Andrew Jackson published in 1847. This Andrew Jackson, however, was born in [[Kentucky]] in 1814; the President [[Andrew Jackson]] was born in 1767 in [[North Carolina]]. The full title of the slave narrative is ''Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky; Containing an Account of His Birth, and Twenty-Six Years of His Life While a Slave; His Escape; Five Years of Freedom, Together with Anecdotes Relating to Slavery; Journal of One Year's Travels; Sketches, etc. Narrated by Himself; Written by a Friend'', Syracuse: Daily and Weekly Star Office.<ref>[http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jacksona/summary.html Jackson, A. ''Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, of Kentucky.''], p. 7, Documenting the South, University of North Carolina</ref>
<ref>[http://www.americanheritage.com/people/presidents/jackson_andrew.shtml "Andrew Jackson"], American Heritage, accessed 18 Jan 2009</ref> Most historians consider President Jackson's parents well documented as Andrew Jackson and Elizabeth Hutchinson, both of [[Ulster Scots people|Scots-Irish]] ancestry, born and married in [[Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland]], who immigrated to North America before the [[Revolutionary War]]. They settled in what is now North Carolina. Jackson's father died about three weeks before he was born.<ref>[http://www.americanheritage.com/people/presidents/jackson_andrew.shtml "Andrew Jackson"], American Heritage, accessed 18 Jan 2009</ref>

*[[Abraham Lincoln]]'s mother, [[Nancy Hanks]], is claimed to have African descent. This is unsubstantiated.

*[[Warren G. Harding]]'s father is claimed to be a [[mulatto]]. The information was first published by 1920s historian [[William Estabrook Chancellor]], a [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic]] political opponent of the [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] Harding. Harding casually said to a reporter that he didn't know whether or not a distant ancestor may have had African heritage.

*[[Calvin Coolidge]]'s mother, Victoria Moor, is claimed to be of a mixed-race family in [[Vermont]]. Coolidge had said she had Native American ancestry. Vaughn noted her surname meant "black" in Europe. It also came to mean swarthy. (Vaughn failed to acknowledge that the first meaning of the Moor/Moore surname is a landscape feature of [[moor]] or bog.)<ref>{{cite book |author=Patrick Hanks, ed. |coauthors= |title=Dictionary of American Family Names |year=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |quote=Moor is a variant of Moore. Moore Name Meaning and History: 1. English: from Middle English more ‘moor’, ‘marsh’, ‘fen’, ‘area of uncultivated land’ (Old English mor), hence a topographic name for someone who lived in such a place or a habitational name from any of the various places named with this word, as for example Moore in Cheshire or More in Shropshire. 2. English: from Old French more ‘Moor’ (Latin maurus). The Latin term denoted a native of northwestern Africa, but in medieval England the word came to be used informally as a nickname for any swarthy or dark-skinned person. | url= |isbn= 0-19-508137-4}}</ref>

*[[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]'s father is claimed to have mixed blood from Africa, and his mother is claimed to be [[mulatto]]. Eisenhower's parents were of German, Swiss and English descent, with his father's ancestors' having immigrated to the colonies in 1741. Both families migrated west to Kansas from Pennsylvania.<ref>[http://www.dwightdeisenhower.com/library-museum.html Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum], shows Home and Tomb, and photo of parents, accessed 30 Jan 2009</ref>

==See also==
*[[African-American heritage of United States presidents]]

==External links==
*[http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/biography.html "Brief Biography of Thomas Jefferson"], Monticello Foundation
*[http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/nc/bio/public/jackson.htm "Andrew Jackson"], North Carolina State Library
*[http://www.alplm.org/home.html The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum] Springfield, Illinois
*[http://www.calvin-coolidge.org/html/victoria_josephine_moor_coolid.html Victoria Josephine Moor Coolidge photo and data], Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation
*[http://www.forbeslibrary.org/coolidge/coolidge.shtml Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum], Forbes Library, Northampton, MA
*[http://www.dwightdeisenhower.com/library-museum.html Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum, including Home and Tomb, and photo of parents]
*[http://books.google.com/books?id=64k-Uo8OPP8C Dr. Leroy Vaughn, ''Black People and Their Place in History''] at [[Google]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:United States history books]]