African-American heritage of presidents of the United States

This article includes information on the African heritage of presidents of the United States, together with information on unsubstantiated claims that certain presidents of the United States had African ancestry. 
Presidents with African ancestry.
Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama, who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, had an African father and an American mother of mostly European ancestry. His father, Barack Obama Sr. (1936–1982), was a Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Kenya. In July 2012, drawing on a combination of historical documents and Y-DNA analysis, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that Obama—through his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham—was descended from John Punch, known as the "first official slave in the English colonies."
Unsubstantiated claims that presidents have/had African ancestry.
Claims that certain U.S. presidents other than Barack Obama had African or African-American ancestry have been made by the historian William Estabrook Chancellor, amateur historian J. A. Rogers, ophthalmologist Leroy William Vaughn, and Auset BaKhufu. All but Chancellor base their theories chiefly on the work of J. A. Rogers, who apparently self-published a pamphlet in 1965 claiming that five presidents of the United States, widely accepted as white, also had African ancestry. Vaughn's and BaKhufu's books also appear to have been self-published.
Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims been published in any peer-reviewed journal. These authors are generally ignored by scholars. They repeat each other's material and are classified as "rumormongers and amateur historians." Vaughn and BaKhufu have added little substantive research to their claims, although there has been extensive new documentation of the potential African heritage of other presidents in the decades since Rogers published his pamphlet.
Thomas Jefferson.
Vaughn and others claim Thomas Jefferson's mother Jane Randolph Jefferson was of mixed-race ancestry. The academic consensus does not support such claims. In her recent analyses of historical evidence about the Hemings and Jeffersons, for example, the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed makes no claim of African descent in the Randolph family.
Specifically, Vaughn says, "The chief attack on Jefferson was in a book written by Thomas Hazard in 1867 called "The Johnny Cake Papers". Hazard interviewed Paris Gardiner, who said he was present during the 1796 presidential campaign, when one speaker states that Thomas Jefferson was a mean-spirited son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father." An overlapping claim is that, in an 18th-century Presidential campaign, someone speaking against Jefferson's candidacy and in favor of that of John Adams accused Jefferson of being "half Injun, half nigger, half Frenchman" and born to a "mulatto father" or slave and "a half-breed Indian squaw", this birth to a mulatto and an Indian allegedly "well-known in the neighbourhood where he was raised" but otherwise unproven. 
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, the major public history site on Jefferson, characterizes Jefferson's parents this way: "His father Peter Jefferson was a successful planter and surveyor and his mother Jane Randolph a member of one of Virginia's most distinguished families." They describe the quote in "The Johnny Cake Papers" as one frequently repeated, but it is attributed in written sources to the 1800 rather than the 1796 election campaign and clearly is one made by political opponents. "The Johnny Cake Papers" were a collection of folk tales published in 1879, not 1867, and only one tale commented on Jefferson. Dixon Wecter, in his essay "Thomas Jefferson, The Gentle Radical," discusses various portrayals of Jefferson by his political enemies, and mentions that "the Jonnycake [sic] Papers later burlesqued such caricatures..."
Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson referred to a charge that his "Mother ... [was] held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and [that his] ... eldest brother [was] sold as a slave in Carolina." Less specific was a rumor of Jackson having "colored blood", meaning having "Negro" ancestry; this rumor was unproven. President Jackson's father was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in current-day Northern Ireland, around 1738. Scholars Hendrik Booraem, Robert Remini, and H. W. Brands have agreed he had no black ancestors.
Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln's mother Nancy Hanks was claimed to be of African descent (Ethiopian).
According to historian William E. Barton, a rumor "current in various forms in several sections of the South" was that Lincoln's biological father was Gorge Enloe, which Barton dismissed as "false". According to Doug Wead, Enloe publicly denied this connection to Lincoln but is reported to have privately confirmed it. Another claim was that Lincoln was "part Negro", but that was unproven. According to Lincoln's law partner William H. Herndon, Lincoln had "very dark skin" although "his cheeks were leathery and saffron-colored" and "his face was ... sallow," and "his hair was dark, almost black". Abraham Lincoln described himself "c." 1838–39 as "black" and his "complexion" in 1859 as "dark", but whether he meant either in an ancestral sense is unknown. The Charleston "Mercury" described him as being "of ... the dirtiest complexion".
Warren G. Harding.
Warren G. Harding was said to have African ancestry; one claim was by his political opponent, a controversial and racist historian, William Estabrook Chancellor. Chancellor said Harding's father was a mulatto and Harding's great-grandmother was black. During Harding's campaign, Democratic opponents spread rumors that Harding's great-great-grandfather was a West Indian black and that other blacks might be found in his family tree. Chancellor publicized rumors, based on supposed family research, but perhaps reflecting no more than local gossip. In an era when the "one-drop rule" would classify a person with any African ancestry as black, and black people in the South had been effectively disenfranchised, Harding's campaign manager responded, "no family in the state (of Ohio) has a clearer, a more honorable record than the Hardings', a blue-eyed stock from New England and Pennsylvania, the finest pioneer blood." "Many biographers have dismissed the rumors of Harding's mixed-race family as little more than a political scandal and Chancellor himself as a Democratic mudslinger and racist ideologue." According to Chancellor, Harding got his only academic degree from Iberia College, which had been "founded to educate fugitive slaves." The college was founded by abolitionist supporters in the Presbyterian Church in Ohio for students of both genders and all races. 
When asked directly about Chancellor's account, Harding did not make any effort to deny that he may have had an African-American ancestor. He said he did not know and demonstrated that it was not a significant issue.
The rumors may have been sustained by a statement Harding allegedly made to newspaperman James W. Faulkner on the subject, which he perhaps meant to be dismissive: "How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence." However, while there are gaps in the historical record, studies of his family tree have not found evidence of an African-American ancestor.
In 2015 genetic testing of Harding's descendants determined, with more than a 95% percent chance of accuracy, that he lacked sub-Saharan African forebears within four previous generations.
Calvin Coolidge.
Calvin Coolidge's mother Victoria Moor was claimed to be of a mixed-race family in Vermont. Vaughn noted that her surname was derived from "Moor", a European term for people of North Africa. He did not note that another meaning of her surname is the landscape feature of moor or bog. People's surnames were often based on such landscape features when surnames became generally adopted in 14th century England. Moor/Moore is a common name in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's mother was said to be of mixed blood from Africa and mulatto. However, historians and biographers of Eisenhower had documented his parents' German, Swiss and English ancestry and long history in America. Some of his immigrant ancestors settled in Pennsylvania in 1741 and after, migrated west to Kansas.