PolitiFact | Looking at claims Kamala Harris is the descendant of a slave owner
By: Ciara O'Rourke (Politifact)
Sure is a lot of hand waving to say "yeah, but ..." Naturally those who fact check the fact checkers will point out that the Politifact check is from August, 2020. Have the facts about Kamala Harris' identity been changed by her political situation?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Since presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, attacks on herheritage as an Asian American and Black woman have grown online.
Several Facebook posts, such as this one, seem to be trying to undermine her credibility among some voters by connecting Harris' family to a slaveholder named Hamilton Brown.
"The American Left went from 'defund the police' & 'remove all monuments to slave owners,' to 'let's elect a cop whose family owned slaves in Jamaica,' in less than 3 months," the post says.
That claim has also gotten pushback from Harris supporters like writer Lauren-Ashley Howard.
"I have news for you about the descendants of enslaved Africans," Howard tweeted on Aug. 11. "Damn near ALL of us have a Hamilton Brown in our family tree. Because enslaved women were regularly raped by the white men who owned them."
The Facebook post was flagged as part of Facebook's efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
We reached out to the Biden campaign about the claim and about what we discovered looking into it, but did not receive a response.
Records and online genealogy archives suggest Harris' great-great-great-grandfather was a slaveholder. But there's also evidence that Harris is descended from people who were enslaved. Here's what we know.
The ancestry claims of Kamala Harris' father
On Jan. 13, 2019, Jamaica Global Online published an essay that Kamala Harris' father, Donald J. Harris, wrote in 2018.
In "Reflections of a Jamaican Father," Donald Harris, an emeritus economics professor at Stanford University, recounts both his childhood in Jamaica and visits he made to the country with his own children. Recalling his family history, he also says that he is the descendant of a "slave owner" — Hamilton Brown, a man born in Ireland who enslaved people in Jamaica and managed plantations there.
"My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (nee Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown's Town), and to my maternal grandmother, Miss Iris (nee Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me)," the essay reads. "The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural 'produce' exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown's Town."
Miss Crishy, who died in 1951 at the age of 70, according to Donald Harris, "often said" that "her ancestor" built the Anglican church. He also named other family members in the essay: "My dear mother 'Miss Beryl' and loving father 'Maas Oscar.'"
According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London, Hamilton Brown was an attorney and "resident slave-owner in Jamaica" who founded Brown's Town in Saint Ann, Jamaica. He was born in County Antrim in Ireland and died on Sept. 18, 1843. (His birth date is unknown, according to the center.) Snopes, which looked into this claim in 2019, when Kamala Harris was still a presidential candidate, found a document held by the U.K. National Archives that shows Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826.
Investigating the Harris family tree
Academics we contacted who have studied slavery in Jamaica suggested we check FamilySearch, a free family tree database run by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"Most Jamaican vital records have been microfilmed by the Latter-day Saints," said Trevor Burnard, a professor of slavery and emancipation at the University of Hull in England.
It's important to note that anyone can edit the family trees on FamilySearch, even people who aren't members of that family. A spokesperson for the service said the community self-governs but recommended referring to original source documents before coming to any final conclusions.
To cut to the chase: We found a lineage seemingly connecting Hamilton Brown to Kamala Harris. But the family tree we traced it on has a number of holes and inconsistencies, and it was created by FamilySearch users, some of whom were actively editing it as we reported this story. While we found corroborating records for some of the relationships, we couldn't confirm all of them. And some of the sources used to build this family tree aren't official documents. Donald Harris' essay is among the sources cited.
When we reviewed the family tree on Aug. 12, we found a Hamilton Brown Jr., who was listed as being born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1775 and dying in Brown's Town, Jamaica, in 1843. From there we traced his lineage to Kamala Harris.
According to the family tree, Hamilton Brown Jr. had a son named Hamilton Brown, who, with a woman named Jessian Prince, had a daughter named Christiana Brown. Christiana Brown and Joseph Alexander Harris had a son named Oscar Joseph Harris. Oscar Joseph Harris and Beryl Finegan had Donald Harris. And, finally, Donald Harris married Shyamala Gopalan, and the couple had Kamala.
But the details of that lineage are not nearly so tidy.
There were six children listed for Hamilton Brown Jr. when we looked on Aug. 12, including a son also named Hamilton Brown. But we could only find corroborating records for two of the kids: Mary Melvina Brown and George Hamilton Brown.
The family tree listed multiple partners for the younger Hamilton Brown, including Jessian Prince. We didn't, however, find any records connecting the two people. Still, the family tree said she bore two children with him: "Unknown Brown" and Christiana "Miss Crishy" Brown. A scanned civil registration record from Jamaica shows that a woman named Christiana Brown was the daughter of Jessian Prince. We didn't find anything identifying her father.
Miss Crishy, who would be Kamala Harris' great-grandmother, had four children with Joseph Alexander Harris, according to the family tree, including Oscar Joseph Harris. A civil registration recordshows that Oscar Joseph Harris Brown was the son of Christiana Brown.
Oscar Joseph Harris had a son with Beryl Finegan, according to the family tree: Donald Jasper Harris. This appeared to be Kamala Harris' father: it said he married Shyamala Gopalan, which is the name of the vice presidential candidate's late mother.
Neither Kamala's name nor her sister Maya's name appeared in the family tree. And it also reflected that Donald Harris died in 2002, but he is still alive.
There were other discrepancies. Two of the women listed as the mothers of Hamilton Brown's children, for example, were also listed as his sisters. And when we revisited the family tree website on Aug. 13, Donald Jasper Harris's listing was gone entirely. "Person not found," the website said. "This person does not exist, has been removed, or is restricted in FamilySearch." We got the same error message for Christiana "Miss Crishy" Brown.
Expert insight
Burnard, who wrote a book about Jamaican slave overseer Thomas Thistlewood, told us that if Kamala Harris' father says he's a descendant of Hamilton Brown, "I would be inclined to believe him."
It wouldn't be unusual for Harris to have "some slave owner heritage," Burnard said. "That would be extremely normal for members of Jamaica's middle class, especially the educated elite, which is where Kamala Harris comes from."
While some official records have survived since Hamilton Brown was alive, Tom Zoellner, who wrote about the Jamaican rebellion of enslaved people in his book, "Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire," noted that other records likely never existed at all. The slave-owner class in Jamaica wouldn't necessarily want to document all of their descendants, some of which, he noted, may have been borne from raping an enslaved person.
It seems possible that Kamala Harris is as likely a descendant of a slave-owner as she is an enslaved person. Jessian Prince, who the family tree identified as Miss Crishy's mother and would therefore be Kamala Harris' great-great-grandmother, is listed on birth and death records as a "labourer." Almost always, Zoellner said, laborers in Jamaica at that time were "people of African extraction who were the children and grandchildren of enslaved people who had been freed in 1838."
Enslaved Africans forced to work on sugar plantations in Jamaica rebelled numerous times before they were finally emancipated. In 1808, an abolition bill was passed and the slave trade was declared "utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful," according to a history of the country on the Jamaican government's website. Emancipation and apprenticeship started in 1834, but enslaved people were not fully free until 1838.
From 1834 to 1838, the term "labourer" meant "apprentice" — "basically a paid slave," Zoellner said. After emancipation, "the energy of planters was now to be directed towards converting a former slave labour force into a permanent plantation labour force," according to the government. "From the perspective of the planters, it was the same rider on the same mule, cantering towards the same destiny."
Snopes unearthed a death certificate for a 70-year-old Christiana Brown who died on June 11, 1951. That's the year Donald Harris said in his essay that Miss Crishy died at age 70.
The birth record we found for the Christiana Brown who was born to Jessian Prince tracks with this timeline. According to the document, she was born on Aug. 13, 1888. She would have been 70 in 1951.
Context is important, and it's missing from recent social media posts about the senator's family. In the end, though, we don't have enough documentation to put this claim to the Truth-O-Meter. If new evidence comes to light, we'll update this story appropriately.
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Facts are facts. Facts are timeless. Except when they're not according to the unbiased liberal press.
"I have news for you about the descendants of enslaved Africans," Lauren-Ashley Howard tweeted on Aug. 11. "Damn near ALL of us have a Hamilton Brown in our family tree. Because enslaved women were regularly raped by the white men who owned them."
From the Article.
She is adorable: Kamala Harris!
Has it occurred to you that abortion was legal in colonial and antebellum America because white women didn't want to have Black babies? Restrictions on abortion really didn't rise to significance until after the Civil War.
The two hardest things in the English language to say:
"I'm sorry" and "Trump was right."
For every one thing he was right about he committed twenty wrongs. The math doesnt work.
He was right about everything starting with the border.
Except here is a pic of infant Kamala and her Dad Donald J Harris!
He wasn't an African American.
Reflections of a Jamaican Father
By
Donald J. Harris [Father of Kamala Harris]
My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown , descendant of Hamilton Brown
Miss Chrishy dressed up in her usual finery, standing in front of the home at Orange Hill, St Ann parish where I spent my early years
who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finega n ,
farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me).
Please keep it up. Your, "Kamala is not black", sthick is working...
For Harris!
Reflections Of A Jamaican Father
By Donald J. Harris [Father Of Kamala Harris]
My granddaughter Meena, her aunt Kamala and me
Get your facts first. Then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain
I didnt read a word of this meaningless crap but I assume it says she is the descendant of a slave owner otherwise you wouldnt have seeded it.
That says alot
Why do you call her father’s recollections “meaningless crap”?
I don't care if she is black. I don't care if her ancestors were asian. I don't care if her ancestors owned slaves. But I draw the line if she has an Irish ancestor. Some things are just too hard to get past.
I don't care that she has an Irish slaveholder ancestor. . . "we" are not responsible for the 'reprobates' as they were in our lineage. It reminds me of Barack Obama's ancestry line. . .snf Irish background:
"We, your Irish family are right here!"
President Obama Addresses the Irish People
As for Kamala's slaveholder relationship back in the day, . . . nobody has constructed a monument to him, as far as is being discussed.
Can you imagine if Trump had a slaveholder ancestor?
The left would be in full melt down over it. As would many of my friends here.
Slavery's descendants: America's family secret
WASHINGTON — As U.S. lawmakers commemorated the end of slavery by celebrating Juneteenth this month, many of them could have looked no further than their own family histories to find a more personal connection to what’s often called America’s “original sin.”
In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of members of Congress, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.
Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, for example, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate — 28 members — can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.
Among those lawmakers from the 117th Congress are Democrats and Republicans alike. They include some of the most influential politicians in America: Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, and Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth and Jeanne Shaheen.
In addition, Reuters determined that President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president — except Donald Trump — are direct descendants of slaveholders: Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and — through his white mother’s side — Barack Obama . Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — also have direct ancestors who enslaved people.
In 2022, 11 of the 50 U.S. states also had governors who are descendants of slaveholders, Reuters found. They include eight chief executives of the 11 states that formed the Confederate States of America, which seceded and waged war to preserve slavery. Two are seeking the Republican nomination for president: Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, and Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
More info provided on link: Slavery's descendants: America's family secret (nbcnews.com)
There is no constitutional clause that disqualifies f ormer slaveholders (were there any alive and able to serve) and bars slaveowners' descendants from being president of the United States!
There is no moralizing that should strike a vote for a qualified and decent candidate for the office of president despite the sins of a past descendant, either.