President Joe Biden’s ancestors owned multiple slaves in Maryland during the 1800s, according to census records and slave schedules.
According to a Politico report adapted from the book The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, Jesse Robinette, Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, owned two slaves and another great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Randle, also owned a 14-year-old boy as a slave in 1850.
The Western Journal reported Biden has a “distant tie” to Varina Anne Banks Howell, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. West Virginia genealogist Alexander Bannerman uncovered Biden’s family background.
Despite the news, Bannerman described the president’s ties to slavery as “limited.”
Due on shelves next week, the book also uncovered that Biden lived in a house that included a restrictive deed that prohibited Black owners or occupants. However, the former vice president
pushed back on those claims in 1986, according to the Associated Press, saying his parents ‘filed a declaration of disavowal saying they find the restriction morally repugnant.”Fox News also reported Biden claimed the deed his dad signed did not include a restrictive covenant.
In addition to several gaffes
he made during the run-up to the presidential election, Biden’s past includes his treatment of Anita Hill and when he said desegregation policies would cause his children to grow up in a racial jungle in 1977.The Delaware native has also given eulogies for South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, a former KKK member who supported segregation.
Biden, who has one of the most racially diverse cabinets in American history (nearly 55% nonwhite and 45% female), has largely kept promises he made to Black Americans before he was elected. The president has signed executive orders advancing racial equity, increasing funding for HBCUs, and environmental justice in underserved communities.
If a Supreme Court seat becomes available, Biden has named Ketanji Brown Jackson as a potential nominee.