First Black President? Hah!

In fiction and in fact, we have already had several. I'll start with the fiction because if you don't already know this, you're perhaps not ready for the "facts."

"The most famous Black President of this century is one Douglass Dilman: he is the hero of The Man, a 1964 best-selling novel by Irving Wallace, which was later made into a movie starring James Earl Jones. Thrust into the Oval Office after a crisis of succession, President Dilman swiftly finds himself the target of popular animosity and Beltway intrigue," the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine some years ago, while profiling Colin Powell. At the time Powell was the Barack Obama of the 1996 presidential season.

On the currently popular Fox series, 24, we have our second Black president within the span of a few years: The current president, Wayne Palmer, is the brother of President David Palmer, who was assassinated. Now, how much of a stretch is this? A kind of Bush dynasty.

But let me get more serious. I am a fan of the late J. A. Rogers, a Black man who devoted his life to shredding myths about Blacks in the U.S. and in Africa. Not long before his death in 1966, Rogers, a former Pullman porter, published a pamphlet called The Five Negro Presidents. It's available in many Afro-centric bookstores, on eBay and on other web sites.

This is my thumbnail sketch: When it has been convenient in the US to label people as Colored or Negro or Black to deny them the rights and privileges of American citizenship, this has been done. If anyone could identify even the most minute Black lineage, then that could be held against you. Rogers wanted to turn this "even itty-bitty blackness makes you Black" into a positive. Thus, using public documents and published works, he "outed" Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Warren Harding. He did not name "Soul Brother President No. 5," but a journalist who produced a program about this for PBS told me that he was Dwight Eisenhower. Another historian has added Calvin Coolidge to this list.

Because of racial head trips, some people I've come across can imagine that Jefferson's father and uncles could have fathered children with their Black slaves, but cannot imagine that Jefferson could be the father of Sally Hemings' children. Or that President Jefferson himself could have had at least a little dab of blackness in him.

Maybe we are moving towards a place and time where these notions about race are irrelevant. After all, Obama is a White man as much as he is a Black man. His mother: a White woman from Kansas; his father: a Black man from Kenya; his stepfather: an Indonesian. He grew up in Hawaii and in Indonesia.

J. A. Rogers would have a field day with this!