The worst president of all time?
George Washington: 600+ slaves
Andrew Jackson: 600+ slaves
Zachery Taylor: 300+ slaves
Andre Jackson: 200+ slaves
James Madison: 100+ slaves
James Monroe: 75+ slaves
James K. Polk: 56+ slaves
John Tyler: 29+ slaves
William Henry Harrison: 11+ slaves
Andre Johnson: 9+ slaves
Martin Van Buren: 1+ slave
Ulysses S. Grant: 1+ slave
And that's just the slave owners.
George W. Bush(Barack & Michelle's friend)
Not only did President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) in 2003 increase the stranglehold of standardized testing on America’s children—tests antiracists have long argued were racist. NCLBA more or less encouraged funding mechanisms that decreased (or did not increase) funding to schools when students were struggling or not making improvements on tests, thus privately leaving the neediest students of color behind.
Then two years later, President Bush’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) publically left thousands of stranded Black folk behind after Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. While reporters quickly reached the Gulf Coast, federal officials made excuses for their delays, quickening the death spiral in New Orleans, ensuring that President Bush would land on this list of the most racist presidents of all time. And to top it all off, President Bush’s economic policies—his lax regulation of Wall Street loaners and speculators—helped bring into being the Great Recession, bringing about the largest loss of Black wealth in recent history.
John Calvin Coolldge Jr:
President Bush’s FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina seemed prompt when compared to President’s Coolidge’s handling of the Great Mississippi (River) Flood of 1927.
While most White communities were saved, riverside Black communities were flooded to reduce the pressure on the levees. And then these thousands of displaced Blacks were forced to work for their rations under the gun of the National Guard and area planters, leading to a conflagration of mass beatings, lynchings, and rapes.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson:
President Wilson oversaw the re-segregation of the federal government. Black federal workers were fired, and those that remained faced separate and unequal workspaces, lunchrooms, and bathrooms. He refused to appoint Black ambassadors to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as was custom. Professor Wilson and then President Wilson unapologetically backed what he called the “great Ku Klux Klan,” and championed the Klan’s violent disenfranchisement of southern African Americans in the late 19th century. President Wilson began the
two brutal decades U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, preventing Haitians from self-governing.
Dwight David Eisenhower:
When NAACP lawyers persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to rule Jim Crow as unconstitutional in 1954, President Eisenhower did not endorse Brown v. Board of Education and dragged his feat to enforce it. At a White House dinner the year before, President Eisenhower had told Chief Justice Earl Warren he could understand why White southerners wanted to make sure “their sweet little girls [are not] required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.” He reluctantly sent federal troops to protect the Little Rock Nine who were desegregating an Arkansas high school. He considered the act to be the most repugnant of all his presidential acts. During those critical years after the 1954
Brown decision, this former five-star World War II general did not wage war against segregation. And he remains as much to blame as anyone for its persistence, for the lives lost fighting against it.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
FDR’s racism was even more impactful that his uncle, Teddy. President Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942 that ended up rounding up and forcing more than 100,000 Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II is arguably the most racist executive order in American history (He thankfully spared German and Italian Americans from the military prisons, but that showed his racism).
And while some of the White American competitors in the 1936 Berlin Olympics received invitations to the White House, Jesse Owens did not. President Roosevelt’s snub of the U.S. four-time gold medal winner came around the same time he was pushing through Congress all of the job benefits in his New Deal, like minimum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, and unionizing rights. Farmers and domestics—southern Blacks’ primary vocations—were excluded from the New Deal and federal relief was locally administered, satisfying southern segregationists. Northern segregationists were also satisfied by the housing discrimination in New Deal initiatives, like coding Black neighborhoods as unsuitable for the new mortgages. As such, Black communities remained buried in the Great Depression long after the 1930s while these New Deal policies (combined with the GI Bill) exploded the size of the White middle class.
Ronald Wilson Reagan:
The arbiter of the “welfare queen” myth who evoked the old slaveholder and segregationist mantra of “states’ rights” perfected President Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy” that actually worked nationally. President Reagan attracted voters through racially coded appeals that allowed them to avoid admitting they were attracted by the racist appeals. He stood at the head of a reactionary movement that undid some of the material gains of civil rights and Black power activists. During President Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent and the number of poor Americans, who were disproportionately Black, increased by 2.2. million—a sign of things to come under Reaganomics. Then in 1982, President Reagan announced his War on Drugs at an inauspicious time: when drug use was declining . “We must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country,” Reagan said:.
President Reagan surely did not mobilize any of his forces to stop the CIA-back Contra rebels of Nicaragua from smuggling cocaine into the country to fund their operations. But he surely did mobilize his forces to draw media attention to their spreading of crack cocaine in 1985. The media blitz handed his slumbering War on Drugs an intense media high in 1986. That fall, he signed “with great pleasure” the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established minimum sentencing for drug crimes and led to the mass incarceration of Black drug offenders over the next few decades. Like his campaign strategies, President Reagan took President Nixon’s racist drug war to a new level, and the mass incarceration of Black bodies accelerated under the George H.W. Bush (times two) and Bill Clinton administrations, especially after Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. White drug offenders, consuming and dealing drugs at similar or greater rates, remained disproportionately free. Reagan stands on this list as the representative of all these mass incarcerating presidents in the late 20th century.
