Background
These claims have been made by the historian William Estabrook Chancellor, amateur historian J. A. Rogers, ophthalmologist Dr. Leroy William Vaughn, and Dr. Auset BaKhufu. All but Chancellor base their theories chiefly on the work of J. A. Rogers, who apparently self-published a pamphlet in 1965 claiming African ancestry of five presidents. Vaughn's and BaKhufu's books appear to have been self-published.
Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims above been peer-reviewed. They are generally ignored by scholars. They repeat each other's material and are classified as "rumormongers and amateur historians." Vaughn and BaKhufu have added little substantive research to their claims, although there has been extensive new documentation of race relations by others in the decades since Rogers published his pamphlet.
Read more about this topic: African-American Heritage Of United States Presidents
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