How DNA Testing Traced Isaiah Washington and Coretta Scott King to Sierra Leone's Mende People

Genetic ancestry testing has given a small number of African Americans something the historical record of slavery almost never provides: a named ethnic connection to a specific African people. Two of the most publicized cases both point to the Mende, an ethnic group concentrated in southern and eastern Sierra Leone, though the two cases differ in an important way: one involved direct testing of the person themselves, the other involved a descendant.

Actor Isaiah Washington, then starring as Dr. Preston Burke on Grey’s Anatomy, submitted a DNA sample to African Ancestry, Inc. in 2005. The company, a pioneer in marketing mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA testing to African American customers, matched his maternal lineage to the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone, with his paternal line tracing separately to the Mbundu people of Angola. Washington pursued the connection well beyond a novelty result: he traveled to Sierra Leone, funded a maternity clinic and school, and in May 2006 was granted full Sierra Leonean citizenship on the strength of his DNA evidence, the first time an African American had been naturalized in an African country by that route. Mende chiefs later bestowed on him the honorary title Gondobay Manga II, and Washington documented the journey in his 2011 memoir, A Man from Another Land.

Coretta Scott King’s connection to the Mende surfaced differently, and after her death. In September 2010, African Ancestry revealed the results of DNA testing on Martin Luther King III at a “DNA Reveal Dinner” hosted by the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation’s African Policy Summit in Atlanta, alongside similar testing on Julius Garvey, Marcus Garvey’s son. Because mitochondrial DNA passes from a mother to all of her children essentially unchanged, King III’s maternal-line test result was in effect his mother’s result: it traced Coretta Scott King’s direct maternal ancestry to the Mende people, complementing paper-trail genealogical research that had already traced Martin Luther King Jr.’s paternal ancestry to Ireland. Neither Coretta Scott King nor her husband was tested directly; the finding rests on genetic material inherited from her and carried, unaltered, in her son.

Tests like these carry real scientific limits worth stating plainly. Mitochondrial and Y-DNA tests trace only two lineages out of thousands of ancestors a person has accumulated over centuries, and peer-reviewed research on African American mitochondrial DNA has found that many haplotypes match sequences carried by multiple African ethnic groups across a wide region, not one population exclusively, a consequence of the continent’s unusually deep genetic diversity and centuries of migration before the slave trade ever began. A “Mende match” is a genuine, database-confirmed genetic signal, not folk etymology or guesswork, but it identifies a probable regional and ethnic association rather than pinpointing a single village or ancestor with certainty. That caveat did not diminish what the results meant to the people who received them: for Washington in particular, a statistical match became the basis of a new, legally recognized national identity.