HEADS
OF HATE
written by
Christopher Winston
and
E.k. Ervin
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1st President
George Washington
No Party, 1789-1797
George Washington, 1st President of
the United States and commonly
referred to in American history
classes as “the Father of the
Country”, held human beings in
forced bondage his entire life. Upon
his death, he manumitted (freed) all
of those that he personally held, the
only one of the nine slaveholding
presidents to do so. Washington
believed that slavery should be
abolished by “slow, sure, and
imperceptible degrees”, meaning as
painstakingly slow as humanly
possible.
This was in line with the fact that
slavery was the bedrock foundation
of the American economy, a legal
institution in all of the 13 Colonies
that became the United States.
Washington was from Virginia, a
state where “40% of the population
were slaves for life”, and grew up
with the institution surrounding him.
During his service in the American
rebellion against the British
monarchy, Washington was
constantly accompanied by his
personal valet, Billy “Will” Lee, who
was equally if not more renowned
as a horseman as Washington
himself.
Washington also appears to have
supported the use of Black troops by
the Continental Army after initial
hesitation and learning of British
plans to arm black slaves who had
liberated themselves, but, like all
slaveowners and the overwhelming
majority of white people in what
would become the United States,
considered them inferior to white
troops and white people in general.
1st President
George Washington
No Party, 1789-1797
As President, Washington
authorized $400,000 and 1,000
weapons to be sent to SantDomingue (Haiti) to put down the
struggle made by the enslaved
people of that island in 1793-94. He
also signed the first Fugitive Slave
Act, which stipulated the legality of
pursuing runaway slaves for the rest
of their lives (Washington himself
would spend his last years pursuing
a runaway slave
named Ona Judge), and also that
children born to fugitive mothers
would be slaves of their mother’s
master for the rest of their lives.
Washington’s history is that of
personal opposition (at least in
principle) to slavery, while also
profiting greatly from it and as
President enabling the continued
oppression of people held in
bondage.
Why would Washington
want a slow abolishment
of slavery?
The Gilder Lehman Institute of American History. “George Washington on the Abolition of Slavery, 1786.”
Henriques, Peter R. “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret: George Washington and Slavery”. 2001.
2nd President
John Adams
Federalist, 1797-1801
John Adams, while never being a
slaveowner himself, opposed
abolitionists who demanded the end
of slavery, while despising the
institution himself, personally. He
wrote in response to a letter from
concerned members of the Society of
Friends (Quakers) in 1801:
There are many other Evils in our
Country which are growing, (whereas the
practice of slavery is fast diminishing,)
and threaten to bring Punishment on
our Land, more immediately than the
oppression of the blacks. That Sacred
regard to Truth in which you and I
were educated, and which is certainly
taught and enjoined from on high,
Seems to be vanishing from among
Us.
A general Relaxation of Education and
Government. A general Debauchery as
well as dissipation, produced by pestilential
philosophical Principles of Epicurus
infinitely more than by Shews and
theatrical Entertainment. These are in my
opinion more serious and threatening Evils,
than even the slavery of the Blacks,
hateful as that is.
I might even add that I have been
informed, that the condition, of the common
Sort of White People in some of the
Southern states particularly Virginia, is
more oppressed, degraded and miserable
than that of the Negroes.
2nd President
John Adams
Federalist, 1797-1801
Adams wrongly thought that slavery
was on the decline, and ignored that
the white people in the South who
were poor were also free, while the
enslaved black people were poor
and couldn’t do anything to remedy
the situation.
What Evils threatened
the country more than
slavery?
His stand against abolitionism and
desire for gradual and painstakingly
slow change show his fundamental
unconcern at the root with the plight
of the black masses. He focused
more on the foreign policy side of
things, and thus was opposed to the
Haitian revolutionary situation,
seeing it as a threat to good order in
the United States.
The Gilder Lehman Institute of American History. “John Adams on the Abolition of Slavery, 1801.”
3rd President
Thomas Jefferson
Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809
Jefferson, like many of the other
“Founding Fathers”, was a
slaveowner, owning several
hundred. His famous mansion,
Monticello, was built in major part
through the use of skilled slave
labor, and his existence was
attributable almost exclusively
through the exploitation of slave
labor. Jefferson also owned
properties and slaves at Poplar
Forest, He was also the primary
author of the United States
Declaration of Independence
(where he blamed the British Crown
for inciting slave and Native revolts),
and his presidential term saw the
expansion of the United States
through the purchase of the
Louisiana Territory from France.
Jefferson supported gradual
emancipation of slaves, and
subsequent education and
colonization in other countries.
During his time in Virginia’s House of
Burgesses, Jefferson proposed
several anti-black laws. As
governor of Virginia, Jefferson
offered slaves to white men willing
to volunteer for military service
during the Revolution. Unlike George
Washington, Jefferson refused to
support the emancipation of all of
his slaves in his will or during his
lifetime, allowing only two freedom
in his lifetime and manumitting only
5 out of hundreds in his will. It’s well
known that Jefferson also fathered
children by an enslaved woman,
Sally Hemings, who was a halfsister of Jefferson’s wife.
Jefferson supported the French
attempts to reclaim Haiti after the
Revolution, loaning $300,000 to the
French Government and declaring
that it would be “the murder of our
own children” if the US remained
neutral in this conflict. Jefferson in
theory supported the abolition of
the international slave trade as
President, considering it a massive
violation of human rights, but did
nothing to curb the domestic trade
and sale of slaves.
3rd President
Thomas Jefferson
Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809
As he aged and became more and
more indebted, Jefferson used his
hundreds of slaves as collateral to
his creditors to fund his lavish
lifestyle and scientific projects.
Despite his consistent private
writings stating that the institution
of slavery was “moral and political
depravity,” Jefferson was an
extreme racist, stating in reference
to the intellectual capabilities of
blacks:
“The Indians, with no advantages of
this kind, will often carve figures on
their pipes not destitute of design and
merit. They will crayon out an animal,
a plant, or a country, so as to prove the
existence of a germ in their minds which
only wants cultivation. They astonish
you with strokes of the most sublime
oratory; such as prove their reason and
sentiment strong, their imagination
glowing and elevated.
But never yet could I find that a
black had uttered a thought above the
level of plain narration; never saw even
an elementary trait of painting or
sculpture. In music they are more
generally gifted than the whites with
accurate ears for tune and time, and
they have been found capable of
imagining a small catch.”
Jefferson also feared that freeing
slaves would provoke race war and
insurrection similar to that in Haiti
during his time as President, and
feared that the country would
become a true bloodbath. Thus, he
supported colonization as opposed
to allowing blacks to remain in the
United States that they had worked
so hard against their will to build up
and develop. In essence, Jefferson
was thoroughly self-interested and
a hypocrite on the slavery and the
race question.
What new perspective do you
have about the Declaration of
Independence now that you know
it was written by a slave owner?
Poplar Forest. “Jefferson’s Views on Slavery”.; Notes on the State of Virginia
4h President
James Madison
Democratic-Republican, 1809-1817
James Madison was a lifelong
slaveowner, from a family that had
dealt and trafficked and grown rich
from slave labor for three
generations. He inherited his Virginia
plantation, Montpelier, from
relatives, and held over 100 slaves in
bondage there. Madison is most
renowned in the history of the
United States for his key role in the
framing of the Constitution, and his
term as president, which was
marked by the War of 1812 (in which
slaves were used to fight fires set by
British troops who burned
Washington D.C. to the ground), and
a paternalistic, hypocritical policy
towards American indigenous
people complete with massive
thefts of land in the Ohio Territory,
supported by Madison’s
government.
Madison, in the presence of friends
who were abolitionists, opposed
slavery, yet continued to live from
the work of people held in forced
bondage, which was the pinnacle of
hypocrisy and falsehood. Friends
from the Marquis de Lafayette to
Jesse Torrey criticized his shameless
slaveholding, and yet when he died,
he still held about 100 slaves, none
of which he freed in his will. He
spent the last years of his life
defending the spread of slavery
within the United States, opposing
the use of the Missouri Compromise
to regulate slavery and “clarifying”
the intentions of the framers of the
Constitution regarding the bloody
institution.
How do you view the Constitution
now that you know it was
partially written by a president
that owned hundreds of slaves?
5th President
James Monroe
Democratic-Republican, 1817-1825
Monroe was born into Virginia
slaveholding society, and had
roughly 75 slaves. He sold his first
plantation, complete with slaves, to
finance his entry into law and
politics in 1783. He later became
extremely wealthy and politically
powerful, owning several
plantations, but lived the life of an
absentee slaveowner and
landowner, preferring to live a l avish
lifestyle in the cities. His plantations
were often failing to break even and
make money, but Monroe’s lavish
lifestyle forced overseers to treat
slaves with merciless cruelty and
abuse to wring as much value out of
them as possible. Monroe often sold
slave families apart to settle debts,
with no concern for the well-being
or family ties of affection for each
other.
Monroe had no use for
emancipated slaves, or freedmen,
in the United States. He supported
efforts to remove freed people to
Africa, particularly to what was to
become Liberia, with the capital
named Monrovia in his honor.
Monroe also sent troops, led by
Andrew Jackson (known to the
indigenous peoples as Sharp Knife)
to destroy Seminole and Black
communities in what was then
Spanish Florida. In essence, Monroe
was a typical Southern hypocrite
and preferred to keep slavery in the
back of his mind at the best of times
and send what he perceived as the
problem (freed slaves) overseas
instead of allowing them US
citizenship.
What was Monroe (and many
others) afraid of? Why would they
want to send freed slaves to
another country instead of
making them citizens?
6th President
John Quincy Adams
1825-1829
John Quincy Adams was from an old
Massachusetts family that opposed
the institution of slavery. In practice,
Quincy Adams was more firmly
against the institution that his
father, who also served as
President.
That said, Adams could not be
considered an abolitionist, because
he was never in favor of immediate
emancipation of slavery in the
manner of individuals such as
William Lloyd Garrison and John
Brown. He was seen by many as
being the archenemy of the slavery
bloc in Congress, forcing it to hear
petitions against slavery despite a
gag order put in place by
slaveholding representatives from
the Southern states.
He also destroyed his friendship
with John C. Calhoun, who became
the foremost defender of slavery in
Congress, while Quincy Adams
considered it a bad policy that
sowed disunity.
He also opposed the annexation of
Texas as a slave state and the
entree of the United States into the
Mexican-American war. Most
famously, Adams argued in favor of
would be slaves who had seized the
Spanish slave ship Amistad before
t he United States Supreme Court,
which ruled in their favor, opening
the path for them to return home.
6th President
John Quincy Adams
1825-1829
However, Adams had a dual aspect.
Despite being firmly opposed to
slavery, this was not entirely
because of his opposition to human
bondage. Adams was a firm
American patriot and American
nationalist, with a distinguished
pedigree that played a major role in
the development of the country.
Adams feared that slavery “would
disrupt the calm by exacerbating
long-standing sectional divisions
and, even more importantly, by
exciting civil commotion...unless
something was done, there would
inevitably be an “Insurrection of the
Blacks against the whites.”
Adams feared that slavery would
tear the country apart and continued
abuses against blacks would
provoke a race war that Blacks
would ultimately lose, and lose
bloodily.
The specter of Haiti and the failed
domestic uprisings that had,
nonetheless, killed several dozen
whites, weighed heavily on Adams’
conscience and mind as it did on that
of Washington, Adams I, Jefferson,
and Monroe, and the consciences of
white slaveowners from Charleston
to New Orleans.
To that end, it’s important to
understand that whiteness,
particularly white Americanness,
informed Adams’ positions and
policies more than anything else. He
didn’t want violence, sectional splits,
and rebellions rending the heart and
soul of his country, but he failed to
understand that contradictions like
those between slave and free simply
cannot be papered over.
How does "whiteness" impact
present day politics?
Howe, John R. "John Adams's Views of Slavery." The Journal of Negro History 49.3 (1964)
7th President
Andrew Jackson
Democrat, 1829-1837
Andrew Jackson was an extremely
wealthy man, and slavery was the
source of his wealth. Jackson’s
plantation, Hermitage,
“was a 1,000 acre, self-sustaining
plantation that relied completely on the
labor of enslaved African American
men, women, and children. They
performed the hard labor that produced
The Hermitage’s cash crop, cotton.
The more land Andrew Jackson
accrued, the more slaves he procured to
work it. Thus, the Jackson family’s
survival was made possible by the profit
garnered from the crops worked by the
enslaved on a daily basis.
When Andrew Jackson bought The
Hermitage in 1804, he owned nine
enslaved African Americans. Just
25 years later that number had
swelled to over 100 through purchase
and reproduction. At the time of his
death in 1845, Jackson owned
approximately 150 people who lived
and worked on the property.”
Jackson had obtained for himself
notoriety by his brutal suppression
of Native American struggles in the
South and his desire to snatch as
much of their land for the use of
white settlers as possible. His
administration was notorious for its
uncompromisingly cruel Indian
Removal policy, under which
hundreds of thousands of Native
people (some of which owned
slaves) were forced to migrate west
of the Mississippi River, mainly to
what is now Oklahoma, but was at
the time called “Indian Territory”.
Untold numbers died.
7th President
Andrew Jackson
Democrat, 1829-1837
Jackson’s Democratic Party was a
populist one, orienting itself
towards the masses of white, land
hungry settlers. It was also an
explicitly pro-slavery one, taking a
hostile position towards abolitionist
efforts and opposing any attempts
to give any relief or aid to the
masses of slaves who produced the
lion’s share of America’s wealth.
He chose to play politics and gamble
with the lives of enslaved people
instead of taking a firm stand, and
this placed him firmly in the camp of
enemies of the black masses.
During his term, pro-slavery
representatives in Congress
(Jackson’s supporters) were able to
suppress abolitionist activities in
that body by placing a gag rule
(tabling) on anti-slavery petitions.
“Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage”. Slavery.
Jackson’s Postmaster General, Amos
Kendall, gave Southern postmasters
arbitrary power to send out or
detain anti-slavery tracts sent to the
South.
Jackson was an advocate of unity,
and this led him to placate his
Southern white base by being
lukewarm or hostile to the antislavery issue, choosing instead to
leave settlement of the slavery
question to “Providence”, while
doing everything within his power to
ma ke life as easy for slaveowners as
possible. Jackson supported the
admission of Texas, settled by
slaveowners, into the United States,
which abolitionists denounced as a
slaveowners’ conspiracy.
Andrew Jackson was one of the
most hateful presidents in the
U.S., yet there are schools,
museums and the $20 bill with
his name on it. Why is he
celebrated?
8th President
Martin Van Buren
Democrat, 1837-1841
Van Buren was the descendant of
Dutch settlers in New York. He
considered slavery cruel and
immoral, and also opposed the use
of cheap black labor, seeing it as
unfair competition with free white
workers, but never put his own
personal views on the question into
practice, choosing instead to use the
United States Constitution (written
by slaveowners, majorly) to justify
his milquetoast position on the
issue.
Van Buren’s father himself owned 6
slaves in their home village of
Kinderhook, and Van Buren owned a
slave named Tom, who fled.
When Tom was recaptured, Van
Buren sold him to the slave-catcher
for $50. Van Buren continued the
vicious indigenous removal policies
of his predecessor, and generally
was the consummate politician all
throughout his career, taking
cynical, opportunist, and wishywashy approaches despite having
personal misgivings about the
slavery institution.
By taking no real position, was
Van Buren's presidency more
harmful to Blacks?
9th President
William Henry Harrison
d.1841
Harrison obtained notoriety initially
in his attacks on the indigenous
people of the Northwest Territory
(current day Michigan, Indiana, Ohio,
Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin),
particularly his activities at the
battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.
During an 1822 congressional
campaign, he told voters in Ohio that
he was a member of an Abolition
Society, and opposed slavery as an
affront to the American ideals of
liberalism and democracy. Later, he
recanted this statement, saying that
he was simply a member of a
Humane Society. This was a cynical
move, taken to gain Southern
support and votes. In Congress, he
opposed several measures that
would have curbed slavery in
Missouri and Arkansas, seeing them
as “palpable violations of the
Constitution”. On equal rights for
emancipated slaves, Harrison said in
1835:
Some of the emancipators propose
immediate abolition .... Is there any
man of common sense who does not
believe that the emancipated blacks,
being a majority, will not insist upon a
full participation of political rights with
the whites; and, when possessed of these,
they will not contend for a full share of
social rights also? What but the
extremity of weakness and folly could
induce any one to think, that such
propositions as these could be listened to
by a people so intelligent as the
Southern States?"
Harrison died only a few months
after being inaugurated as
President, but it’s not a far stretch of
the imagination that he would have
continued to support the oppression
of Black people for political gain,
whatever his activities as a youth.
Was Harrison really against
Black people?
10th President
John Tyler
Whig/Democrat, 1841-1845
John Tyler was a Virginian, a
supporter of settler-colonialist
expansion (referred to as Manifest
Destiny), and to this end, supported
the admission of Texas, a slave
state, to the United States. This
admission was a vital part of his
administration’s platform, and
abolitionists decried it. Tyler was a
slaveowner, and defended the
institution, driving his 70 slaves to
the brink of exhaustion or death to
maintain high yields.
He opposed the consideration of
free blacks as US citizens. To
finance his family’s move to
Washington, he auctioned off his
favorite house slave, and he leased
slaves to other people. He
considered abolitionists to be the
lowest of individuals, seeing them
as seditious, dangerous, and
criminal, seeking to disrupt and
destroy the natural order of things
as mandated by the Christian God.
He saw Africans as heathens,
barbarians, and idolaters. One of
his slaves, Armistead, was killed in
an explosion on the USS Princeton
while Tyler remained safe below
deck. After John Brown’s raid on
Harper’s Ferry, Tyler commanded a
cavalry company to harass slaves,
and during the Civil War, he
supported the Confederacy firmly,
and was given a Confederate state
funeral with a Confederate flag
draped over his coffin.
Why did John Tyler represent
two parties?
11th President
James Polk
Democrat, 1845-1849
Polk was an adamant supporter of
slavery during his whole adult
political life. He owned 24 slaves,
and advocated whipping as
punishment, in lieu of imprisonment.
His administration was marked by
foreign policy concerns, namely, the
imperialist Mexican-American War,
which saw the wrenching of the
current US states of California,
Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of
Colorado and New Mexico away
from Mexico.
On slavery, his administration was
firmly Southern and white
supremacist in its orientation, like
all the rest, seeking to isolate and
oppose Northern abolitionists at
every turn and support the
expansion of slavery to new
territories. He saw discussion
against slavery as sectionalism and
serving to stir up sedition and split
the country, despite being a proslavery partisan himself.
Are there other examples of
white supremacy in
the White House?
12th President
Zachary Taylor
Whig, 1849-1850
Zachary Taylor, a national war hero
also known as “Old Rough and
Ready”, was a large slaveowner
(145), and a fierce partisan of the
South. A Virginian, Taylor was
described as a lover of money and a
greedy man who would work his
slaves to death to maximize his own
profits.
He told the future President of the
Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in
1847 that "So far as slavery is
concerned, we of the south must
throw ourselves on the
constitution & defend our rights
under it to the last, & when
arguments will no longer suffice,
we will appeal to the sword, if
necessary."
Knowing that so many
presidents were slave owners,
how has that changed your view
on democracy?
Understandingprejudice.org. Zachary Taylor.
13th President
Millard Fillmore
Anti-Masonic, Whig, Know
Nothing, 1850-1853
Fillmore was a New Yorker and held
no slaves. He expressed moderate
anti-slavery sentiment, but upon
rising to office (after being a
member of reactionary political
parties like the Anti-Masons),
supported the right of slaveowners
to capture fugitive slaves by signing
into law the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850. He was quick to pass the
blame for slavery, telling Daniel
Webster that whites should not be
held responsible for slavery, and
that it’s an evil that is guaranteed by
the Constitution of the United
States.
He called the Blacks in the United
States a “wretched race”,
supported their removal to Africa or
the West Indies, and called wrongs
committed by slaveowners
“imaginary”. Fillmore was,
essentially, a hypocrite, and his own
words can do more justice in proving
so than anything anyone else can
say about him:
“God knows I detest slavery, but it is
an existing evil, for which we are not
responsible, and we must endure it and
give it such protection as is guaranteed
by the constitution, till we get rid of it
without destroying the last hope of free
government in the world.”
Can you be a non-slave owner
and still support slavery?
Millard Fillmore - Slavery, President, Taylor, and Compromise - JRank Articles http://law.jrank.org/pages/6890/FillmoreMillard.html#ixzz4LDW5PvJW
14th President
Franklin Pierce
Democrat, 1853-1857
Pierce was a Democrat from New
Hampshire, who opposed the
abolitionist movement, as he saw it
as a threat to the unity of the
country.
He supported pro-slavery
elements (Border Ruffians) from
Missouri, who set up a legislature in
a rigged election in Kansas, and
firmly enforced the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850, resulting in the
notorious case where a fugitive
slave that had found refuge in
Massachusetts was forcibly
arrested and returned to Virginia.
Pierce, upon leaving office, became a
fierce enemy of Abraham Lincoln,
calling the Civil War pointless and
vigorously denouncing the
Emancipation Proclamation.
Most atrociously, Pierce signed the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854,
which repealed the Missouri
Compromise of 1820, which had
restricted slavery to the same
latitude as the southern border of
the state of Missouri.
This new act placed the slavery
question in the territories of Kansas
and Nebraska in the hands of white
farmers, who could manipulate and
rig the vote for slavery. This earned
Pierce the ire of every abolitionist
and democratic element in the
country.
How would the abolishment of
slavery threaten the unity
of the country?
15th President
James Buchanan
Democrat, 1857-1861
Buchanan was born in the Quaker
stronghold of Pennsylvania, but in
terms of practice, he might as well
have been born in Mississippi or
Alabama and held 900 slaves. He
enjoyed the political and social
company of Southern elites, was
openly hostile to abolitionists and to
black people, and sided with the
Southerners in elected office. He
believed that slavery wa s a matter
best left for individual states to
decide, telling his Inauguration Day
crowd:
"It is the imperative and indispensable duty of
the government of the United States to
secure to every resident inhabitant the free and
independent expression of his opinion by his
vote. This sacred right of each individual must
be preserved. That being accomplished, nothing
can be fairer than to leave the people of a
territory free from all foreign interference to
decide their own destiny for themselves, subject
only to the Constitution of the United
States."
Buchanan chose to play politician,
upholding and encouraging others to
uphold the Dred Scott decision,
which stated that black people, free
or slave, had no rights that white
men were bound to respect,
appointing proslavery Southerners
to his cabinet, and trying to allay
sectional tensions, despite the fact
that the antagonisms were rapidly
and sharply growing and lines of
demarcation were being drawn. The
country was headed for Civil War
and quickly, and Buchanan didn’t
seem to be apt to want to settle the
question. He stated in his 1860 State
of the Union address that the
institution of slavery was to be “left
alone”, and the events of the
next year showed how foolish this
statement would be. By this time,
Buchanan was happily out of the
White House and Lincoln was
embroiled in a Civil War.
What could potentially happen
when something like slavery is
left up to each state? Are there
present day examples?
Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “James Buchanan: Domestic Affairs.”
http://millercenter.org​/president/biography/buchanan-domestic-affairs.
16th President
Abraham Lincoln
Republican, 1861-1865
Lincoln was born into a poor family
in Kentucky in 1809. He practiced law
before entering politics, like most
American presidents. Despite being
seen as the “Great Emancipator” and
an ardent foe of slavery, Lincoln was
actually a moderate on the slavery
issue, never identifying as an
abolitionist and never calling for
immediate ending of slavery in the
United States until 1864 and the Civil
War had begun to solve that
question. His wife was from a
slaveholding family in Kentucky.
That said, Lincoln obviously had
severe personal issues with
slavery, writing in an 1855 letter to
his personal friend, slaveowner
Joshua Speed:
“You know I dislike slavery; and you fully
admit the abstract wrong of it. So far there is
no cause of difference. But you say that
sooner than yield your legal right to the
slave -- especially at the bidding of those who
are not themselves interested, you would see the
Union dissolved.
“ I am not aware that any one is bidding you
to yield that right; very certainly I am not. I
leave that matter entirely to yourself. I also
acknowledge your rights and my obligations,
under the constitution, in regard to your slaves.
I confess I hate to see the poor creatures
hunted down, and caught, and carried back to
their stripes, and unrewarded toils;
but I bite my lip and keep quiet. In 1841
you and I had together a tedious low-water
trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St.
Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that
from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio, there
were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled
together with irons. That sight was a continued
torment to me; and I see something like it
every time I touch the Ohio, or any other
slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to
assume, that I have no interest in a thing
which has, and continually exercises, the power
of making me miserable. You ought rather to
appreciate how much the great body of the
Northern people do crucify their feelings, in
order to maintain their loyalty to the
Constitution and the Union.”
16th President
Abraham Lincoln
Republican, 1861-1865
Lincoln supported the American
Colonization Society’s efforts to
sent freed slaves to Liberia to form
a colony. He was of the opinion that
black and white people could not
live in the same country as equals,
and it was for the blacks’ own good
that they be deported and free white
labor take their place.
He also opposed marriage between
black and white people, and didn’t
believe in the 1850s that blacks
should be citizens or have the same
democratic rights that white citizens
had.
He rejected the expansion of the
slavery institution because he saw
it as being immoral. His Republican
Party did not want to abolish slavery
right away, although certain
elements, termed “Radical
Republicans” did seek that goal.
Lincoln belonged to the moderate
wing of the party, and criticized and
was criticized by the radicals. After
the beginning of the Civil War,
Lincoln refused to allow Union
generals to mandate the liberation
of slaves in captured territory,
fearing the wrath of slaveowners in
border states that remained within
the Union such as Maryland and
Delaware. He announced his line to
Horace Greeley in a letter of 1862:
I would save the Union. I would save it the
shortest way under the Constitution. The
sooner the national authority can be restored,
the nearer the Union will be "the Union as
it was." If there be those who would not save
the Union unless they could at the same time
save slavery, I do not agree with them. If
there be those who would not save the Union
unless they could at the same time destroy
slavery, I do not agree with them. My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery.
16th President
Abraham Lincoln
Republican, 1861-1865
If I could save the Union without freeing
any slave, I would do it; and if I could save
it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and
if I could save it by freeing some and leaving
others alone, I would also do that. What I
do about slavery and the colored race, I do
because I believe it helps to save the Union;
and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not believe it would help to save the Union. I
shall do less whenever I shall believe what I
am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more
whenever I shall believe doing more will help
the cause. I shall try to correct errors when
shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new
views so fast as they shall appear to be true
views.
Roy P. Basler et.al. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 1953.
Miller, Marion Mills. Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln. 1907.
During his administration, Lincoln
attempted to convince freedpeople
to settle voluntarily in Panama,
Liberia, Haiti, the British West Indies,
and Belize. Ultimately, his goal was
to save the United States, not to free
slaves, and he would undoubtedly
tell us this if he were alive today.
If all the freed slaves left the
country like Lincoln (and many
others) proposed, what would
America look like today? Would
America be one of the most
powerful countries in the world
without Black people?
17th President
Andrew Johnson
Republican/Democrat, 1865-1869
Andrew Johnson became President
after Abraham Lincoln was shot and
killed in 1865. He held firmly proslavery views all throughout his
political career, beginning in the
1820s and ‘30s when he served as
alderman of the town of Greeneville,
Tennessee on a workingmens’ ticket.
He supported a constitution for the
state that disenfranchised free
people of color, and revered the
slaveholder and murderer of the
indigenous, Andrew Jackson. He
supported the Mexican War and the
expansion of slavery into territory
taken from Mexico in said war, and
also firmly supported the right to
hold slaves itself, seeing the right to
hold slaves as sacrosanct and
supported by the Constitution.
During the Civil War, Johnson was
the most prominent Southern
Unionist and Democrat, and thus had
quite a national platform as Vice
President, chosen by Lincoln with
the intention of placating and
throwing a bone to Southerners. He
hated treason, not slavery. After
Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson’s
reconstruction plan did not stipulate
provisions for the suffrage of freed
slaves.
17th President
Andrew Johnson
Republican/Democrat, 1865-1869
He was more intent on bringing to
power ex-Confederates, and
Johnson’s mishandling (purposeful
or not) of the Black question
emboldened Southern reactionaries,
who passed harsh Black Codes to
salvage as much of the slavery era
order of things as possible. He
vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866,
and opposed the continued
existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
claiming that both were
infringements on state sovereignty.
Johnson was far more concerned
with the plight of former rebels and
white slaveowners than the plight
and rights of the millions of Black
people who suffered in the South. He
gave amnesty and pardon to all
former Confederates who swore
loyalty to the Union, but denied the
Freedmen’s Bureau the resources to
provide for former slaves and assist
in their economic development.
Why was slavery so important
for Johnson?
18th President
Ulysses S. Grant
Republican, 1869-1877
Grant’s inaugural address urged the
rapid adoption of the 15th
Amendment, which granted the
right to vote regardless of race or
previous condition of servitude, and
signed it in 1870, stating that “it was
"a measure of grander importance
than any other one act of the kind
from the foundation of our free
government to the present day." He
supported the institution of the
Enforcement Acts of 1870, which
were laws meant to protect the
freed slaves from violence from the
Ku Klux Klan and other white
reactionary formations who sought
to prevent the exercise of their
newly acquired right to vote.
Grant, a general and professional
soldier by trade, used federal troops
in many instances to curb violent
acts in the South, earning him the ire
of white Southerners, who saw him
as a tyrant trampling on their rights.
White Northerners, who saw the
end of slavery as the end of the war,
also were tired of the troops in the
South, and didn’t view blacks as
social or political equals. Grant’s
Administration was constantly
embroiled in a myriad of plots,
intrigues, and scandals, and thus his
legacy was that of an inept
individual with an alcohol addiction,
even though he was more militant in
government defense of Black
“rights” than Johnson was. That said,
there were opportunities for him to
intervene to quell violence and
expand Black rights that he chose
not to take. Such is the character
and nature of relying on white
politicians and officials to protect
Black lives and rights.
Who was more supportive of
Black rights, Lincoln or Grant?
19th President
Rutherford B. Hayes
Republican, 1877-1881
Hayes spent most of his time in
office trying, vainly, to singlehandedly “erase the color bar” in
the South, doling out patronage to
black and white Republicans alike,
and ending Reconstruction, the
result of the “Compromise of 1877”,
which mandated that he end
Reconstruction and pull federal
troops from the South, who were
there supposedly enforcing Federal
voting laws. It also mandated the
appointment of one Southern
Democrat to his cabinet, in this
instance, the office of Postmaster
General. Black Republicans who had
risen to high office saw this,
rightfully, as a betrayal. Many of
these individuals, and the black
nation as a whole in the South,
would fall prey to subsequent
instances of anti-black violence and
lynching, and the South began to
creep rapidly back under white
Democratic hegemony.
Hayes, after leaving office,
supported the Slater Fund and
played a major role in assisting
W.E.B. Du Bois in obtaining education
at European universities. Hayes
supported raising Black people to
full status as citizens, and also
supported Native rights as well, but
he was also a politician, and
certainly made deals to boost his
own political chances while
essentially stabbing those he sought
to help in the back. That said, he was
worth more to the Black nation that
many of the others on this list, even
more recent presidents.
Why is the “Compromise of 1877”
still relevant today?
20th President
James A. Garfield
Republican, 1881
Garfield only served as President for
a few months before he was
assassinated. That said, he had a
fairly liberal line on civil rights for
Blacks at the time, opposing white
resistance in the South and
supporting educational efforts to
raise the Black cultural and literacy
level. He appointed Frederick
Douglass and other Black
individuals as officials in his
administration, and also worked
against the habit of the Republican
Party seeking to compromise and
ingratiate itself with racist white
Southern Democrats. He was shot to
death by an angry office seeker.
Do you think Garfield was
assassinated because of his
liberal views?
21st President
Chester A. Arthur
Republican, 1881-1885
Arthur distinguished himself by
taking cases as an attorney in
defense of the rights of freed black
people. Upon coming to office after
the assassination of Garfield in 1881,
he found himself struggling to cope
with continued attacks on black
voting rights in the South at the
hands of Bourbon Democrats, or
conservative white Southern
Democrats with ties to the old
slaveocracy.
His party suffered as a result, and he
was forced to orient instead
towards independents, such as the
Readjusters, a progressive political
coalition which sought to defeat the
poll tax and increase funding for
public works and schools in the
state of Virginia. Under his watch,
the Supreme Court struck down Civil
Rights legislation, and he was
incapable of getting Congress to
pass any more similar acts to try to
protect the democratic and civil
rights of Blacks in the South. He
successfully defended a black West
Point cadet, Johnson Chesnut
Whittaker, who was accused of
staging a false attack, but was
subsequently expelled for failing an
exam.
Why was it so hard for a
president to protect
voting rights?
22nd President
Grover Cleveland
Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897
Grover Cleveland was against being
an activist president, or using his
position to try to promote or foster
social change. He preferred to make
speeches and lobby privately. He
was in theory opposed to violations
of the civil rights of the Chinese
taking place on the country’s West
Coast, but did nothing to stop them,
and eventually came to the
conclusion that they were
irrevocably alien and would not be
able to assimilate into the United
States. He also sought to destroy the
culture and heritage of the
indigenous people of the United
States, instead urging them to adopt
Euro-American ways and customs,
viewing them as wayward and
errant children in need of firm
guidance.
He supported the Dawes Act of 1887,
which placed the allotment of land
on reservations in the President’s
hands and functionally robbed the
indigenous people of their land. He
saw Black people as intellectual and
social inferiors and refused to
protect suffrage and civil rights,
essentially doing nothing
whatsoever for the masses of Black
people, or any other people of color,
during his two terms in office.
Did Cleveland's two-term
presidency set back
civil rights?
23rd President
Benjamin Harrison
Republican, 1889-1893
Benjamin Harrison was the grandson
of William Henry Harrison, the 9th
President of the United States. As
President, he supported new civil
and voting rights legislation, saying
that:
“The colored people did not intrude
themselves upon us; they were brought
here in chains and held in communities
where they are now chiefly bound by a
cruel slave code...when and under what
conditions is the black man to have a
free ballot? When is he in fact to have
those full civil rights which have so long
been his in law? When is that quality
of influence which our form of
government was intended to secure to
the electors to be restored?
... in many parts of our country where the
colored population is large the people of
that race are by various devices deprived of
any effective exercise of their political rights
and of many of their civil rights. The
wrong does not expend itself upon those
whose votes are suppressed. Every
constituency in the Union is wronged.”
He also supported a constitutional
amendment to overturn the
Supreme Court decision that
fundamentally nullified the Civil
Rights Act of 1875, and sought to
give funding to schools regardless of
the racial or ethnic origins of the
students. None of this proposed
legislation passed the Congressional
test. He appointed Frederick
Douglass the United States Minister
to Haiti.
Why was Fredrick
Douglass so popular
among presidents?
Socolofsky, Homer E., Spetter, Allan B. The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison. University Press of Kansas. 1987.
25th President
William McKinley
Republican, 1897-1901
Black people that could vote in 1896
were optimistic about McKinley, who
had served as Governor of Ohio and
spoken out against lynching in that
capacity. Their hopes were quickly
dashed, however, when McKinley
showed his priority to be mainly
bridging the divide between
Northern and Southern whites.
Blacks were an afterthought, worthy
of only a few minor positions in the
Treasury Department and Postal
Service. McKinley toured around the
South in 1898, and visited
Confederate memorials and wore a
Confederate badge, while also
visiting the Tuskegee Institute.
This two-facedness and playing
politics lost McKinley much black
support in the coming year. Under
his watch, hundreds of Black people
were lynched and killed in race riots
in the South, and his Administration
was silent. While Harrison
condemned attacks on Black federal
employees, McKinley did no such
thing. When he was shot to death in
Buffalo, New York, in 1901 by Leon
Czolgosz, Black people didn’t
particularly lose much, nor did they
when any other president was killed.
Why didn't McKinley
take advantage of
having Black voters?
26th President
Theodore Roosevelt
Republican, 1901-1909
Theodore Roosevelt was a supporter
of the theory of Social Darwinism, or
ideas that basically state that the
“strongest survive, and the
weakest perish”. He was noted for
being particularly hostile against the
indigenous population, stating that
““I don’t go so far as to think that the
only good Indians are the dead
Indians, but I believe nine out of
every 10 are...the most vicious
cowboy has more moral principle
than the average Indian.” He was a
fervent supporter of American
imperialism and dominance over
“lesser nations”, supporting US
annexation of the Philippines, Cuba
(where he fought at the head of the
“Rough Riders” cavalry detachment)
and Puerto Rico, and routinely
appealed to the supposed inferiority
of the occupants to justify US
attacks on these countries.
As Southern states continued to
oppress and disenfranchise black
people, Roosevelt did nothing to
protect the civil and voting rights of
the masses. He believed in the
abilities of individual Black people,
and invited Booker T. Washington
to dine with him at the White
House in 1901 (to which Senator
Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina
responded: "the action of President
Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger
will necessitate our killing a
thousand niggers in the South
before they learn their place
again.").
26th President
Theodore Roosevelt
Republican, 1901-1909
That said, Roosevelt believed that
Black people as a race were far
below the White race, which he
referred to as “the advanced race”.
Roosevelt supported gradual
extension of civil and political rights,
and rejected attempts to grant
liberty immediately to those he saw
as inferior. He was known to take
hard lines on perceived Black
misbehavior, for example:
“In 1906, a small group of black soldiers
was accused of going on a shooting spree in
Brownsville, Texas, killing one white man
and wounding another. Despite conflicting
accounts and the lack of physical evidence, the
Army assumed the guilt of the black soldiers.
When not one of them admitted responsibility,
an irritated Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable
discharge of three companies of black soldiers
(160 men) without a trial. Roosevelt and the
white establishment had assumed the soldiers
were guilty without affording them the
opportunity for a trial to confront their accusers
or prove their innocence.” This shows
Roosevelt’s true line on the “race question”.
Was Roosevelt a racist or was he
out of touch?
Landry, Alysa. “Theodore Roosevelt: The Only Good Indians Are the Dead Indians”. Indian Country Today Media Network.
June 28, 2016. Web.
Kantrowitz, Stephen. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. University of North Carolina Press. 2000.
27th President
William Howard Taft
Republican, 1909-1913
William Howard Taft was known for
his “Southern Policy”, which held
that he would not make federal
appointments that would anger the
racial sensibilities of white
Southerners. He rejected the
“activist” approach of earlier
Republican presidents by allowing
and acknowledging the Southern
line that blacks must “keep their
place” or suffer, and united with
Booker T. Washington in terms of
the line that struggling for social
equality for Blacks was futile, and
getting good jobs and industrial
training to lay a firm economic
foundation was the “key to success”.
Taft supported Roosevelt’s
unfairness towards Black soldiers
after the Brownsville incident, but
later supported allowing one of
them to seek government
employment. He opposed liberal
education for Blacks, promoting
vocational training only, as he
perceived blacks as inferior and
unable to handle the rigors of a
classical education.
Why was Taft against
educating Blacks? What was
he afraid of?
28th President
Woodrow Wilson
Democrat, 1913-1921
Woodrow Wilson was a proud and
virulent segregationist and white
supremacist. He enforced
segregation in Federal buildings in
Washington DC and across the
country, and idolized the slavery
system in the South, writing books
applauding the masters’ leniency
with “lazy” slaves. He wrote the
white supremacist book, “History of
the American People”, which was
quoted in the white supremacist film
“Birth of a Nation”. Wilson called the
Ku Klux Klan a great institution, and
a “veritable empire in the South”.
When black activist William Monroe
Trotter visited the White House to
lodge complaints about Jim Crow in
federal offices with Wilson, Wilson
became offended at Trotter’s
“audacity” to speak to him as a social
equal, and expelled him from his
office, stating: “Your tone, sir,
offends me...I want to say that if this
association comes again, it must
have another spokesman...You have
spoiled the whole cause for which
you came”. Woodrow Wilson was a
Southerner and a segregationist,
through and through, even though
modern day “progressives” hold him
in high regard. He sent black soldiers
to die in WWI while denying them
basic democratic rights at home.
Was Wilson right? Should Blacks
and whites be segregated?
Lehr, Dick. “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson”. The Atlantic. November 27, 2015. Web.
29th President
Warren G. Harding
Republican, 1921-1923
Harding was known for his corrupt
administration, defined by the
Teapot Dome scandal which sullied
both him and key members of his
administration and associates of his.
Many ended up in prison for crimes
committed while serving in the
Harding Administration. He opposed
immigration of certain types of
immigrants out of fear that they
would spread Socialist and
Communist thought and practice
within the country. On the “Negro
Question”, Harding pandered and
played politician. He was well liked
in the South, and didn’t want to
damage this fact.
However, he knew how to appeal to
a crowd. On October 26, 1921,
Harding gave a speech in
Birmingham, Alabama, where he
spoke of “the great migrations of
black laborers to the North during
World War I,
the meritorious service given by
black soldiers during the war, and
then spoke of political equality as a
guarantee of the U.S. Constitution:
“Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote;
prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit
to vote.” This was lauded by many as the first
time that a President declared his support for
political rights for Blacks in the South, but
his political considerations were primary. By
taking advantage of black votes for his party,
he would isolate Democratic voting white
Southerners and rebuild the Southern
Republican apparatus. Once again, politics
and power were at play, not any actual
concern for the democratic rights of Black
citizens of the US.
Was Harding for Civil Rights?
Harding Says Negro Must Have Equality in Political Life; Does Not Mean Same Social Plane, He Tells South in Birmingham
Speech. Warns Against ‘Demagogy’ Tells Audience He Will Speak Frankly, ‘Whether You Like it or Not.’," New York Times.
October 27, 1921.
30th President
Calvin Coolidge
Republican, 1923-1929
Coolidge, or “Silent Cal” as he was
most popularly known, was a
Vermont Yankee who was renowned
for his lack of extra words and dry
sense of humor. As President,
Coolidge was a fervent opponent of
lynching, calling for legislation
against it. In his first State of the
Union Address, Coolidge said:
“Numbered among our population are some
12,000,000 colored people. Under our
Constitution their rights are just as sacred as
those of any other citizen. It is both a public
and a private duty to protect those rights. The
Congress ought to exercise all its powers of
prevention and punishment against the hideous
crime of lynching, of which the negroes are by
no means the sole sufferers, but for which they
furnish a majority of the victims.”
Coolidge, Calvin. “State of the Union”. 1923.
Coolidge promoted many Black
people to office within the federal
government, and pushed for
increased funding for vocational and
medical training for Blacks as well.
In 1924, Coolidge signed the Indian
Citizenship Act, granting U.S.
citizenship to indigenous people. He
also addressed the graduating class
of Howard University that same
year, applauding the sacrifices made
by black troops in the first World
War . He was a constant foe of racial
discrimination and attacks on
African-American people and
immigrants, replying with
indignation and anger to a letter
addressed to his office stating that
the United States was a “white
man’s country”.
30 presidents later, how does it
feel to know a president that
truly supported Blacks?
31st President
Herbert Hoover
Republican, 1929-1933
Hoover is best known as the
President that presided over the
first few years of the Great
Depression. Shantytowns full of
white and black unemployed or
displaced farmers alike were termed
Hoovervilles, and the country was
generally down in the dumps, no
hope, no job, no money. Breadlines
stretched across city blocks across
the country, and people sold apples
to feed their families. On civil rights
for non white people, Hoover rarely
spoke, thinking that individual
initiative and “can-do spirit” would
prevail and elevate the exceptional.
His wife, Lou Hoover, defied custom
and invited Jessie De Priest, wife of
Congressman Oscar De Priest of
Illinois, to the White House for tea,
which angered the Southern
representatives and boosted their
resolve to stifle Black “social
equality” efforts and struggles by
any means necessary. Hoover’s vice
president, Charles Curtis, was
indigenous, being descended from
the Osage, Kaw, and Potawatomi
tribes. Hoover opposed antilynching legislation, and was
generally lukewarm to cold on Civil
Rights issues.
Why was Hoover lukewarm on
civil rights issues?
32nd President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Democrat, 1933-1945
FDR was probably the most loved
president up to his time, by black
and white alike. In the midst of the
Great Depression, he was seen as
having “rescued” both groups from
the depths of starvation and misery,
and set the country back on a
prosperous course.
Of course, this is just myth, no one
president or individual can claim
responsibility for “rescuing” the
country from the crisis of capitalism
itself, with its anarchy and boom
and bust cycles. Roosevelt wasn’t
the progressive that Democratic
party hacks today tell us that he
was. He wrote in 1925, on the
Japanese in the American West:
"Californians have properly objected on
the sound basic grounds that Japanese
immigrants are not capable of
assimilation into the American
population... Anyone who has traveled
in the Far East knows that the
mingling of Asiatic blood with
European and American blood
produces, in nine cases out of ten, the
most unfortunate results."
This line undoubtedly informed his
decision to intern the JapaneseAmerican population of the United
States shortly after the Pearl Harbor
attack in 1941, while refusing to do
the same to Americans of German or
Italian descent. He was also quite
anti-Semitic, boasting of the fact
that he “had no Jewish blood in his
veins” and refusing to take in
European Jewish refugees. On
African-American civil rights, FDR
proved slow to act, while his wife,
Eleanor Roosevelt, was much more
proactive.
32nd President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Democrat, 1933-1945
The foundation of the “Black
Cabinet”, an informal group of Black
“advisors to the president”, was
largely due to Eleanor’s passionate
activism. Roosevelt also promoted
several black scholars and
community leaders to relatively high
government offices. William H.
Hastie was appointed to the US
District Court for the Virgin Islands,
making him the first Black federal
judge, and was also responsible for
the appointment of several other
Black standouts to government
posts.
In 1942, Roosevelt agreed, verbally,
to allow full integration of the
armed forces, but it was ultimately
Truman who would issue the
executive order making this so. He
issued Executive Order 8802,
creating the Fair Employment
Practice Committee, in June of 1941,
which in practice banned federal
discrimination in corporations that
had federal contracts and within the
federal government itself. This was
possibly the most beneficial piece of
legislation signed in reference to the
masses of working class black
people between Reconstruction and
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in that it
opened millions of well paying jobs
that they were previously barred
from. But, the fact remains, that if
Roosevelt wasn’t pushed, he
wouldn’t act.
How powerful is the first lady?
33rd President
Harry Truman
Democrat, 1945-1953
Truman is best known overseas as
the man who made the conscious
decision to eradicate the lives of
hundreds of thousands of Japanese
civilians in the blink of an eye with
the atom bomb, making the US the
first and only country to ever use
nuclear weapons in an offensive
way.
On the civil rights front, he is known
as the President who “wiped out”
segregation in the US armed forces,
making black soldiers just as likely
to be murdered in service of US
imperialism as anyone else. He also
passed Executive Order 9808, which
established the PCCR (President’s
Committee on Civil Rights), which
generated several recommendations
to improve civil rights for Blacks in
the United States.
This commission recommended
action on civil rights, lest foreign
relations and the world image of the
United States be damaged. His
somewhat progressive rhetoric won
him the black vote in 1948, but also
marked the rise of the reactionary
“Dixiecrats”, who won the South on a
segregationist and white
supremacist platform.
How did Truman win the
Black vote?
34th President
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Republican, 1953-1961
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme
Commander of Allied Forces in WWII,
was elected President in 1952,
replacing Harry S. Truman. He
authorized the development of
NASA, and took a hard line antiCommunist stance, with the first
years of his term being marked by
the McCarthyite oppression of
progressive individuals. His
administration also began the
development of the 41,000 mile
Interstate Highway System, and
several other major infrastructure
projects inspired by his time in
Germany where he marveled at the
great infrastructure and efficiency.
In his first State of the Union
Address, Eisenhower expressed his
willingness to “use whatever
authority exists in the office of the
President to end segregation in the
District of Columbia, including the
Federal Government,
State of the Union Address, February 2, 1953, Public Papers, 1953 pp. 30–1.
and any segregation in the Armed
Forces". He remained silent on key
civil rights rulings such as Brown v.
Board (1954), but strongly upheld
the “rule of law” and was willing to
use Federal troops to enforce court
ordered decisions. This was shown
with the deployment of troops to
Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to
enforce desegregation of Central
High School. In 1957 and 1960,
Eisenhower signed Civil Rights
legislation, weak as it was, it was
the first since Reconstruction.
However, Eisenhower did not see his
role as being to speed school
desegregation, and by the end of his
term, only 6% of Black students
attended desegregated schools. He
met with black leaders only once, in
1958, where he showed anger at
their insistence that he push Civil
Rights as a matter of principle, using
his Presidential “bully pulpit” and
“moral authority”.
What impact did Eisenhower
have on civil rights?
35th President
John F. Kennedy
Democrat, 1961-1963
JFK, as he was popularly known, was
probably the most popular President
of the 20th Century, beloved by
black and white alike. He ran as a
progressive, and received the lion’s
share of the Black vote in the 1960
Presidential election. He expressed
explicit support for a Civil Rights Bill
as a US Senator from
Massachusetts, and also explicitly
courted the Black vote during his
Presidential campaign, calling
Coretta Scott King after Martin
Luther King was arrested and jailed
during a demonstration in
Birmingham, Alabama. He said in his
1961 State of the Union address:
“The denial of constitutional rights to some of
our fellow Americans on account of race – at
the ballot box and elsewhere – disturbs the
national conscience, and subjects us to the
charge of world opinion that our democracy is
not equal to the high promise of our heritage."
As President, Kennedy was a
pragmatist on civil rights issues. He
had to have his hand forced on many
occasions, preferring instead to
pursue US imperialist policy goals in
the Caribbean and across the world.
His brother (and United States
Attorney General), Robert Kennedy
(known to the people as RFK), tried
hard to keep this “goddamned civil
rights mess” off of Kennedy’s desk,
and he hemmed and hawed when
pressed on the Civil Rights struggle.
On Civil Rights, Kennedy’s
watchword was caution. He didn’t
want to break up the crumbling
“New Deal” alliance, and
consistently pandered to Southern
interests (while sending troops to
the University of Mississippi to
protect James Meredith in the midst
of a riot).
35th President
John F. Kennedy
Democrat, 1961-1963
On the campaign trail, Kennedy
established a reputation for refusing
to offer concrete support for Civil
Rights efforts, fearful of alienating
reactionary Southern whites. On the
Freedom Rides, where Northern
students attempted to test the teeth
of federal desegregation legislation,
Kennedy didn’t act until he was
forced, and in Mississippi, he
negotiated with Governor Ross
Barnett to put the Freedom Riders in
prison in exchange for their lives. In
essence, Kennedy moved slowly and
cautiously, more concerned about
his political career than the civil and
democratic rights of the masses of
nationally oppressed people.
Did JFK live up to his promise to
Black voters?
36th President
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Democrat, 1963-1969
Lyndon Baines Johnson was a
Southern Democrat chosen by JFK
for the Vice-Presidential spot in
1960 as a “bone” thrown to Southern
whites. As President (becoming such
after JFK’s assassination in 1963),
LBJ was thrown into the turmoil of
the civil rights movement as it
reached its peak.
He was an avowed and unashamed
racist, constantly making racist
jokes and using racist slurs among
his friends. That said, he was also an
extremely shrewd politician who
knew how to bogart his way through
Congress and win votes by
pandering to various interests.
He was able to make an address
using the phrase “We Shall
Overcome”, and get several key
pieces of Civil Rights legislation
passed, including the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and appoint Black
federal court judges, including
Thurgood Marshall to the US
Supreme Court (1967), but also
referred to Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, and several other
leaders using derogatory names in
private, and made use of the FBI
under J. Edgar Hoover to spy on
them, urging them to commit suicide
and threatening them with
blackmail.
36th President
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Democrat, 1963-1969
He also sent thousands of black and
brown people to die or kill in a racist,
imperialist war in Vietnam, the
foundations of which were laid by
his predecessor, JFK. During the rise
of the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense, he allowed the FBI under
Hoover to systematically seek to
destroy this militant formation for
the protection of the civil and
democratic rights of all people, and
sought to destroy them, seeing them
as a threat to the white supremacist
order in the United States. During his
term, American cities were wracked,
one after another, by riots and
uprisings to which Johnson replied
with merciless and brutal force,
quick to deploy the National Guard
to the inner cities to shoot, kill and
arrest without cause.
How could a publically racist
man become president of the
United States during the civil
rights movement? Did people not
fear that his views would make it
worse for America?
37th President
Richard M. Nixon
Republican, 1969-1974
Richard Nixon was known as a
corrupt, double-dealing,
quintessential American politician.
His downfall came as a result of the
fallout from the Watergate Scandal,
during which it was revealed that
several Black politicians and
leaders were on his notorious
“enemies list” of people that were
to be stifled and attacked by his
administration. He stepped up
efforts to destroy the Black Panther
Party (he was elected on a “Law and
Order” platform in 1968, replacing
the beleaguered Johnson), used
racial slurs behind closed doors, and
generally behaved in a doubledealing fashion on all fronts.
He was extremely homophobic,
struggling bitterly against members
of the LGBTQI* community on
television. As a Senator, he was a bit
of a racial moderate, chairing a
committee to eliminate federal
discrimination on the basis of race,
casting a tie breaking vote to
strengthen black voting rights in the
South, and as president he
supported affirmative action in
federal contractors through the
issuance of Executive Order 11478 in
August, 1969. Nixon supported the
addition of the Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution, but
did little to campaign for or promote
it.
37th President
Richard M. Nixon
Republican, 1969-1974
In essence, he would have agreed
with earlier reformers, both black
and white, who believed that the
Black nation didn’t need revolution,
but needed “good jobs” and to
accept and orient themselves into
the capitalist system. That said, he
also began the War on Drugs, black
soldiers continued to die in Vietnam
under his administration, and he
considered Black people who
criticized his administration to be
“enemies”. He also embraced the
“Southern Strategy”, by which votes
were won from Southern whites by
shrewd use of racial dog whistles
and refusal to openly defend the
interests of Southern blacks.
What do you know about the
"War on Drugs" today?
38th President
Gerald R. Ford
Republican, 1974-1977
Gerald Ford, who was thrust into the
White House on Nixon’s resignation
in 1974, appointed the first black
Secretary of Transportation and
appointed blacks to various other
positions in the Federal
Government. In regards to the
masses of Black people, however,
Ford opposed busing and was
generally muddled and confused on
Civil Rights issues, choosing to
remain lukewarm
and pursuing a policy of inaction
(which he blamed on his being
affiliated with the Nixon
Administration) that delivered over
90% of the black vote to Jimmy
Carter in 1976 and helped seal his
fate as the “accidental President”
that did next to nothing for black
people.
Why was Ford lukewarm on civil
rights issues?
39th President
Jimmy Carter
Democrat, 1977-1981
Jimmy Carter was a Southern
governor (Georgia) that defeated the
embattled Gerald Ford in the 1976
Presidential Election. He defended
the “inherent” right of people to
live in their own homogeneous
(same ethnicity) communities
without “mixing”. He considered the
Civil Rights Act a great thing for the
South, and signed a bill to establish
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in Georgia
as Governor of Georgia. He
supported the Equal Rights
Amendment, and appointed Black
people to several high posts in his
cabinet and Administration. He also
pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam
War drafts, and considers hostility
towards Barack Obama to be
because of the fact that he is Black.
As a young man in Plains, Georgia, he
supported school integration and
made many enemies, even inducing
the local White Citizens’ Council to
boycott his peanut warehouse. That
said, his administration was marked
by the beginning of the foundation
for Reaganite deregulation and an
economic crisis that harmed the
masses of working class black
people and led many to suffer.
Carter has been quite outspoken on
racism and injustice in the United
States since leaving office in 1981,
and has also been active in Habitat
for Humanity and other liberal
charity efforts.
How did Carter promote civil
rights after his presidency?
40th President
Ronald Reagan
Republican, 981-1989
Ronald Wilson Reagan was brought
to power by a torrent of white
outrage at the liberal efforts and
movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. As
the struggles of the people grew,
white anger grew as well, and this
culminated in the election of the
reactionary Reagan in 1980. As
governor of California, Reagan
campaigned against the
revolutionary Black Panther Party
for Self-Defense, passing gun
control legislation aimed explicitly
at them and their program of armed
self defense of black communities.
He opposed the Civil Rights Act of
1964, the Voting Rights Act, and
other legislation aimed at extending
democratic and civil rights to the
masses of oppressed nationality
people, claiming that it was
“humiliating to the South”. He also
opposed fair housing efforts in
California.
The beginning of Reagan’s first term
in office was marked by a protracted
recession, with black communities
suffering the hardest. He engaged
and promoted trade with the
reactionary, fascist Apartheid
regime in South Africa, along with
his British counterpart, Margaret
Thatcher. His Administration
invaded the island of Grenada in
1983, which had been liberated by
the revolutionary government
headed by Maurice Bishop and was
engaging productively with Cuba.
Reagan lied, claiming that Bishop’s
government was aiming Soviet
missiles at other islands, preparing
to invade them, and destroying the
political rights of the Grenadian
people, as a pretext for invasion. His
administration also sold weapons to
Iran to fund reactionary, right-wing
death squads (contras) to oppose
the revolutionary Sandinista
government in Nicaragua.
40th President
Ronald Reagan
Republican, 1981-1989
Under Reagan, the “War on Drugs”,
which is in truth a war on black and
brown people across the world,
kicked into high gear, with millions
of oppressed people finding
themselves in prison for life for
things that got white people a literal
slap on the wrist. Reagan’s Supreme
Court sought to gut all civil rights
legislation and roll back the legal
progress that had been made by
oppressed nationalities during the
past two decades, and he ignored
the AIDS crisis, considering it not
worthy of his time and the product
of a degenerate lifestyle.
Reagan was a racist, fascist,
imperialist President, and black and
brown communities still suffer the
fallout from policies that defined his
presidency. His Supreme Court
justices continue to wreak mayhem
and havoc from the bench on our
communities across the country.
How are we still impacted by
Reagan's War on Drugs?
41st President
George H.W. Bush
Republican, 1989-1993
George H.W. Bush, despite defining
himself as a “moderate”, continued
Reagan era fascistic policies and
lines that harmed Black and Brown
people. He vetoed a Civil Rights Act
in 1990, calling employment quotas
“harmful”. He also sent black, brown
and working class soldiers to
enforce American imperialist policy
goals in the Middle East and in
Panama, causing irreparable
damage to both areas of the world.
In the 1960s, Bush took a
segregationist line, opposing civil
rights legislation under the veil of
“States’ Rights”.
In 1959, Bush bought a house that
was in an area governed by
restrictive covenants, which
mandated that “No part of the
property in the said Addition shall
ever be sold, leased, or rented to, or
occupied by any person other than
of the Caucasian race, except in the
servants' quarters." Bush opposed
the Civil Rights Act on constitutional
grounds, seeing them as violating
Southern rights and was more
concerned about the right to
oppress than the right to oppose
oppression.
Which Bush had a greater
negative impact on Blacks?
42nd President
Bill Clinton
Democrat, 1993-2001
Bill Clinton, despite his well known
pandering to black people that
earned him the later redacted title of
“First Black President” from Toni
Morrison, headed an Administration
that, as far as the masses of Black
and Brown people was concerned,
was the same as that of Reagan or
Nixon. His legacy is that of black
impoverishment and black
incarceration. In 2016, when Hillary
Clinton is running for President
under the umbrella of continuing
Clinton I’s policies, this is extremely
important to remember and learn
from. Clinton’s crime legislation,
endorsed by Democrats such as Joe
Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary
Clinton, mandated: “In addition to
100,000 new police officers, the
measure delivered $9.7 billion in
new funding for federal prisons.
It also contained the muchballyhooed federal assault weapons
ban, eliminated inmate education
programs, expanded the federal
death penalty and codified “three
strikes” sentencing mandates at the
federal level.” This bill, signed into
law by Clinton in 1994, marked the
beginning of the era of mass
incarceration and destruction of
Black communities, with people
being incarcerated for obscene
amounts of time directly because of
his bill. Clinton also supported the
invasion of Haiti by US troops to
intervene in that country’s elections,
and bombed a pharmaceutical
factory in Sudan, which resulted in
life-saving medicine being denied to
millions of Sudanese people. Clinton
was a so called “New Democrat”,
who echoed reactionary, fascistic,
right-wing “tough on crime rhetoric
to appeal to white voters. “Just
weeks before the critical New
Hampshire primary, Bill proved his
toughness by flying back to
Arkansas to oversee the execution
of Ricky Ray Rector,
42nd President
Bill Clinton
Democrat, 1993-2001
a mentally impaired black man who
had so little conception of what was
about to happen to him that he
asked for the dessert from his last
meal to be saved for him for later.
After the execution, Bill remarked, “I
can be nicked a lot, but no one can
say I’m soft on crime.” Clinton’s
welfare reform bill of 1996
criminalized the masses of Black
and Brown poor people, allowing
states to discriminate against
minorities, making it difficult for
them to find jobs after removing
them from the welfare rolls
(recipients now were time-limited)
and moving welfare funds to the
private sector. Masses of black
children ended up in foster care or in
juvenile detention, and black women
ended up in prison. Clinton’s bill,
essentially, killed and broke up the
integrity of black families and
neighborhoods.
“Clinton alluded to the fear of black
street crime, drug use, crack babies,
the breakdown of the family, and the
drain on public dollars. His primary
goal in dismantling AFDC, as he put
it, was to end the “cycle of
dependence” and “achieve a national
welfare reform bill that will make
work and responsibility the law of
the land.” After Clinton’s term, Black
communities were further stripped,
people were in prison, kids were in
foster care or on the streets, and the
prisons were fat. Bill Clinton harmed
black people in ways that are still
with us today.
Was Clinton really America's first
Black president?
Alexander, Michelle. “The Clinton Legacy is Black Impoverishment - So Why Are We Still Voting for Hillary?” The Root.
February 10, 2016.
Nadasen, Premilla. “How a Democrat Killed Welfare”. Jacobin.
43rd President
George W. Bush
Republican, 2001-2009
George W. Bush’s term marked a
rapid decline in what few civil
liberties and democratic rights that
Black people, and people in the US in
general, had. The Patriot Act marked
the beginning of the attacks on civil
rights under the umbrella of
“fighting terrorism”, and countless
individuals ended up in prison
wrongly or dead because of Bush’s
policies. Bush continued the racist
and imperialist policies of prev ious
presidents, continuing to support
and fund the police oppression of
Black people, working class people
of all colors, Muslims, and countless
other strata of the American
population. He supported the
Confederate flag flying on Southern
state capitol lawns, and opposed
affirmative-action policies, choosing
to promote neo-liberal policies and
attempt to assimilate nationally
oppressed people into capitalism
and imperialism.
Bush’s Administration, of which
black reactionaries Condoleezza
Rice and Colin Powell were part, lied
the masses into backing a war of
aggression and imperialism against
the Iraqi people, one that claimed
thousands of lives. While funding
this pointless war on behalf of his
class allies’ corporations and
portfolios, Bush could not respond
adequately to the Hurricane Katrina
situation, leaving countless black
people to die in floodwaters. Bush
continued Reaganite and Clintonite
policies that objectively harmed the
masses of black people and working
class people over the whole world,
prosecuting wars of imperialist
aggression, promoting deepened
exploitation of black and brown
people in prisons and jails, and
promoting capitalism, the system
through which a small minority of
people exploit others’ labor, as the
solution to the world’s problems. He
was rightfully seen as a racist and
imperialist, unworthy of respect, all
throughout his terms as president.
Which Bush had a greater
negative impact on Blacks?
44th President
Barack Obama
Democrat, 2009-2017
Barack Hussein Obama is the first
President born of African descent in
the United States. His father was a
Kenyan student, his mother a white
woman from Kansas. As President,
his policies aligned, by and large,
with the neoliberal agenda laid out
by his predecessors and mandated
by his class interests. His
administration has been marked by
thorough and deep militarization of
the police force, and consistent
p olice killings and abuses towards
ethnic minority people in this
country as a result. Overseas, he has
continued the aggressive and
militaristic policies of his
predecessors, using UAVs
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or
drones) to rain death and
destruction on the masses of Syria,
Yemen, and other countries in that
region. His administration has had
some liberal moments, but in
essence the Obama legacy is the
same as that of his predecessors,
bad for black people.
Under the first black president, Black
people are still last hired and first
fired, are still setting in prison until
they are released into a world that
hates them or are executed, are still
being shot to death in the streets by
the police. Native American and
allied protesters at the Standing
Rock Indian Reservation are, as this
is being written, being driven over
and abused grievously and with
extreme malice by militarized police,
operating under the auspices of the
Obama regime. Protesters in
Milwaukee, Ferguson, Baltimore,
and countless other cities have
consistently been abused by
National Guard forces, operating
under the auspices of the Barack
Obama regime. Obama’s Secretary
of State, Hillary Clinton, aided and
abetted and directly assisted in the
sowing of death and destruction in
Syria and Libya during her term, and
now she wishes to be President. The
Democratic Party, in any sensible
analysis, is just as bad for Black
people and the oppressed the world
over as the Republican Party is.
Does it help to have a Black
president?