African-American heritage of presidents of the United States

The topic of the African-American heritage of United States presidents relates mostly to questions and claims made by amateur historians as to whether five presidents of the United States who were accepted as white also had significant recent African ancestry. There is no disagreement that President Barack Obama (2009–2017) had a Kenyan father and an American mother of mostly European ancestry. (She and Obama are thought also to be descended from the African indentured servant known in colonial records as John Punch.) The academic consensus of historiansis that no president other than Obama has had recent (from the colonial period in U.S. history or after) African ancestry; it rejects claims to the contrary.

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 that five presidents of the United States, widely accepted as white, also had African ancestry. Vaughn's and BaKhufu's books also appear to have been self-published.

Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims above been published in any peer-reviewed journal. These authors 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.

See Slavery in the United States

Citizenship and associated claims have split on two dimensions: formal legal citizenship, and full social and political citizenship. While claims of African ancestry may have created social scandal (and that varied in time and place), even in Thomas Jefferson's time, a person of less than one-quarter African ancestry could be considered legally white. Later this was changed so that a person had to have at least seven-eighths European ancestry to be legally white. Jefferson's mixed-race children from his relationship with Sally Hemings, were seven-eighths white. There is ample evidence in historical records that people of mixed race were accepted as white and full citizens in communities, as they were documented as exercising the rights of citizens to bear arms and vote. Social acceptance by the majority-white community was often the key as to whether a person was considered white, more than details about ancestry, especially in early periods on the frontier when few records were kept and people often did not know much about their origins.

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