The US Presidents Rumored to Have Had Black Ancestry

A claim that has circulated for decades holds that as many as six United States presidents, before Barack Obama, carried African or Black ancestry: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight Eisenhower. The theory traces largely to the writings of J.A. Rogers, a Jamaican-American historian and journalist active in the early and mid-20th century, whose books cataloged rumored African ancestry among prominent white historical figures at a time when such claims carried real political charge, both as an assertion of Black achievement and, in the segregation-era United States, as an accusation meant to damage a public figure’s reputation. Later writers, including Leroy Vaughn, author of “Black People and Their Place in World History,” repeated and expanded on Rogers’s claims, and versions of the list have circulated widely online since.

Each name on the list rests on different, and generally weak, evidence. The claim about Abraham Lincoln centers on descriptions of his complexion and features: Lincoln himself reportedly described his own coloring as “dark” in the late 1850s, and his law partner William Herndon wrote that he had “very dark skin,” details Vaughn and others have cited as evidence of African ancestry, alongside claims about Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks. Mainstream historians have found no genealogical support for the theory; Hanks’s ancestry has been documented as white, and historians treat contemporaries’ physical descriptions of Lincoln’s coloring as unreliable evidence of ancestry on their own. Similar rumors about Andrew Jackson’s mother have likewise been examined and rejected by his principal biographers, including Robert Remini and H.W. Brands, who found no evidence of Black ancestors in his family line.

Warren Harding’s case is the most extensively investigated of the group, because the accusation dogged him during his lifetime in a way the others did not. An Ohio academic named William Estabrook Chancellor built an entire pseudo-genealogical case against Harding during the 1920 presidential campaign, claiming multiple generations of Harding’s family had Black ancestors, a claim amplified at the time by his political opponents. The rumor persisted long after Harding’s death and after his presidency, revived in popular retellings for decades. In 2015, geneticists tested DNA from Harding’s actual descendants and found, with over 95 percent confidence, no detectable sub-Saharan African ancestry within the four generations preceding him, a result that effectively closed the question using evidence Chancellor never had access to. Claims about Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower rest on comparably thin foundations, largely secondhand assertions about their mothers with little supporting documentation, and have not been substantiated by biographers of either man.

Thomas Jefferson’s case is different in kind, because it does not rest on speculation about his own ancestry but on his documented, decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman he held in bondage at Monticello, with whom DNA and historical evidence now confirm he fathered several children. That relationship gave Jefferson’s own descendants, through the Hemings line, genuine and well-documented African ancestry, even though Jefferson himself had none. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s research into the Hemings family found no credible evidence of African ancestry in Jefferson’s own maternal Randolph line, meaning the popular claim about Jefferson conflates two genuinely distinct questions: whether Jefferson himself had Black ancestors, which the evidence does not support, and whether Jefferson has Black descendants, which is unambiguously true and remains one of the more consequential and well-studied facts about his life.