I know we're not suppose to blog twice in one day, but I've been in the mood.
First off - I attempted to re-spark some elevator controversy by placing another image in there. But it wasn't so successful. Someone took it down within a day, and no comments were made about it. I think in order to get another reaction like before, it has to be a new elevator in a different building. Or if I am to use the elevator in my building again, I'm going to have to do something completely different.
On another note - while I was looking into first black presidents, I came across some interesting information. According to Dr. Leroy Vaughn, author of Black People and Their Place in World History, we have already had black presidents. 5 to be exact. These include: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.






According to Vaughn and a few other sources he sites, these men have African American ancestry. This is what he says about each president.
"Thomas Jefferson was “a mean-spirited son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father.” In his book entitled "The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson," Samuel Sloan wrote that Jefferson destroyed all of the papers, portraits, and personal effects of his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, when she died on March 31, 1776. He even wrote letters to every person who had ever received a letter from his mother, asking them to return that letter. Sloan says, "There is something strange and even psychopathic about the lengths to which Thomas Jefferson went to destroy all remembrances of his mother, while saving over 18,000 copies of his own letters and other documents for posterity." One must ask, "What is it he was trying to hide?"
Andrew Jackson was our 7th president from 1829 to 1837. The Virginia Magazine of History Volume 29 says that Jackson was the son of a White woman from Ireland who had intermarried with a Negro. The magazine also said that his eldest brother had been sold as a slave in Carolina. Joel Rogers says that Andrew Jackson Sr. died long before President Andrew Jackson Jr. was born. He says the president's mother then went to live on the Crawford farm where there were Negro slaves and that one of these men was Andrew Jr's father.
Abraham Lincoln was our 16th president from 1861 to 1865. J. A. Rogers quotes Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, as saying that Abraham Lincoln was the illegitimate son of an African man. William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, said that Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and that his mother was from an Ethiopian tribe. In Herndon's book entitled "The Hidden Lincoln" he says that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln's father because he was sterile from childhood mumps and was later castrated.
Harding himself never denied his ancestry. When Republican leaders called on Harding to deny the "Negro" history, he said, "How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence." William Chancellor, a White professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy and identified Black ancestors among both parents of President Harding. Justice Department agents allegedly bought and destroyed all copies of this book. Chancellor also said that Harding's only academic credentials included education at Iberia College, which was founded in order to educate fugitive slaves.
Calvin Coolidge was our 30th president, and he succeeded Warren Harding. He proudly admitted that his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. However, Dr. Bakhufu says that by 1800 the New England Indian was hardly any longer pure Indian, because they had mixed so often with Blacks. Calvin Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor." In Europe the name "Moor" was given to all Black people just as the name Negro was used in America."

I could not find other readings about this, other than the sources Dr. Vaughn gave, so I thought to ask my African American Literature professor, Dr. Pat, if she had heard of such findings. Dr. Pat said she had never heard about those five presidents specifically, but that she wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Everyone, she says, has a mixed heritage. Rarely is anyone strictly of African American decent, or European decent. Thomas Jefferson's wife for instance, Martha Wayes Jefferson, was known to have had a half-sister slave, Sally Hemings, who apparently looked almost identical to Martha. When Martha passed away, Jefferson fathered several children with Sally Hemings, which he neither denies or admits to. So - those who were mixed and "forntunate" enough to pass as white did, and those who looked black, remained to be slaves.
I don't know if it's the recent election, my literature class, or both, but I have recently been more and more interested in our government's history and presidents. I think the government is the root of all racism, the reason Race was created in the first place, and that it is a very important issue for me to address in my work. I need to find a really effective way of displaying all this new information I've obtained.