The African-American heritage of United States presidents is a topic on one President with African-American heritage and is a disputed topic relating primarily to six other Presidents who identified as white and were commonly considered part of European-American society. The academic consensus of historians rejects most of the specific claims below that the men may have had some African ancestry, the consensus acknowledging the long history of interracial relations in the United States.
President Barack Obama had a Kenyan father and an American mother of Northern European ancestry.
Read more about African-American Heritage Of United States Presidents: Background, Significance of Claims, John Hanson
Famous quotes containing the words heritage, united, states and/or presidents:
“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The popular colleges of the United States are turning out more educated people with less originality and fewer geniuses than any other country.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)
“All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)