With the exception of Donald Trump, all living US presidents had at least one ancestor who owned slaves, according to a Reuters analysis.
The genealogies of “America’s political elite” were revealed by Reuters on Tuesday, and it was discovered that President Joe Biden and all of his living predecessors are derived from people who owned Black people as slaves.
Even Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, comes from a white mother’s side of the family and is descended from a slaveowner.
The following US presidents have slaveholding forebears, according to Reuters:
George Bush: Six generations back, one director ancestor held 25 slaves.
Bill Clinton: Five generations back, one director ancestor had one slave.
Jimmy Carter: Four generations back, one director ancestor had 54 slaves.
Barack Obama: Six generations back, one director ancestor held two slaves.
Joe Biden: Five generations back, one direct ancestor held a slave.
Senators and judges are also on the list.
In addition, it was found that 100 members of Congress, 11 governors, and two Supreme Court justices are also descended directly from slaveowners.
At least 28% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats who are now serving in Congress can trace their ancestry to slavers.
Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham are among them, as are Democrats like Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren.
“The preponderance of Republicans reflects the party’s strength in the South, where slavery was concentrated. Although white people enslaved Black people in northern states in early America, by the eve of the Civil War, slavery was almost entirely a southern enterprise,” the Reuters report stated.
All American presidents have extensive ancestry in the country, but according to a Reuters article, Trump’s forebears arrived in the country only after slavery was outlawed in 1865.
An interesting fact is that none of Trump’s grandparents were born in the US. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the US in the early 1900s; they were from the little German town of Kallstadt. According to Business Insider, his mother, Mary, was born in Scotland.
In order to identify the political elite’s ancestry, Reuters claimed to have gathered tens of thousands of pieces of information from thousands of pages of papers.
They asserted that they only looked at evidence of slaveholding that took place after the foundation of the US Journalists, who focused on family trees that included distant cousins rather than researching the straight lineal descendants of the current aristocracy.
