Trump is only living US president not descended from slaveholders, report says
Fox News
Former President Trump is the only living current or living former U.S. president who is not descended from slaveholders, according to a Tuesday report from Reuters.
The report detailed the ancestry of America’s leaders as of the 117th Congress. The report found that five living presidents, two Supreme Court justices, 11 governors and 100 members of Congress had ancestors who owned slaves.
Presidents Biden, Carter, George W. Bush, Clinton and Obama all have ancestors who enslaved Black people in their family trees, according to the report, with Obama’s link coming from his White mother’s side.
Meanwhile, Trump’s family did not immigrate to the U.S. until after slavery was abolished.
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In Congress, Reuters found at least 100 lawmakers who could trace their family trees to slaveholders, including 28 senators and 72 representatives.
Prominent names included Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and James Lankford, R-Okla., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.
At the Supreme Court, only Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch had slaveholding ancestors. Meanwhile, another recent report from the Washington Post found that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had ancestors who were enslaved, while her husband, Patrick Jackson, has ancestors who were slaveholders.
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The report comes amid a nationwide debate over reparations and the legacy of slavery in the U.S. Deep blue states like California have open inquiries into what a slavery reparations program may look like. The state’s Reparations Task Force formally recommended in May that the state offer payments of up to $1.2 million to every qualifying Black resident.
However, that proposal has proven too radical even for Democrats in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to endorse the cash payments shortly after they were proposed.
“The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country,” Newsom said in a statement to Fox News Digital at the time.