RoadKill Radio News exposes the truth behind urban legends.
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(HEAVY = True, Average = Partly True, and Nil = False.)
On the Scale: Barack Obama is Not America’s First Black President
US President Barack Obama is the son of a man born in Kenya, and is generally accepted as being America’s first Black President. Reports have come out that several earlier US President were also part Black.
Veracity Weight: Average. Barack Obama, the United States’ 44th President, is 50% “Black” by virtue of his father being born in Kenya. Some scholars define “Black” as anyone descending from American Negro slaves, and would refer to President Obama as an Africa-American instead.
Because of the archaic “one drop” rule – that is, if a person has at least one drop of Negro blood by way of a distant relative – it has been claimed (although entirely unsubstantiated) that former US Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight Eisenhower were Black. In the end, no US President yet has been entirely “Black” or “African-American”, although President Obama has come closest as half-African-American.
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