President Biden once said that Trump was the first racist president.
We heart Joe but he's giving American too much credit. Maybe he forgot that through 1920, after the Democrats nominated a virulently racist candidate for president, James B. Cox, the party’s official platform was intentionally and overtly racist.
We’ve had lots of racist presidents. The tough task isn’t finding one. It’s ranking who among them was the worst.
We know that 10 of the first 12 presidents enslaved Black people, according to White House documents. All but John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. The last slave-owning president, Ulysses S. Grant, freed his slave before the Civil War, after which he went on to defeat the Confederacy.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, and Zachary Taylor all owned slaves.
Plus, every president until The Great Emancipator, Lincoln, supported the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in some form or another.
Even the enigmatic Lincoln himself was horrifically racist before he met with Frederick Douglass and helped America defeat the South and slavery.
To be sure, Lincoln used the N-word and regularly told racist jokes. He’s on record as saying that Black people were inferior to whites, and he bragged about enjoying racist minstrel shows.
Even in Lincoln’s initial proposals to end slavery, he wanted to ship Black people back to Africa. Another proposal he made to the Confederate side was to allow slavery to continue until 1900 if they surrendered.
Harry Truman was an ally (and possibly a member) of the Ku Klux Klan early in his career. As president, he changed gears by desegregating the armed forces and banning discrimination in the civil service.
JFK’s father was a known Nazi sympathizer.
Lyndon Johnson expressed extreme racist views, despite his ultimate support for various civil rights legislation.
When Jimmy Carter was a state legislator in the final days of Jim Crow, he condoned racist tactics in his successful gubernatorial campaign of 1970.
As California governor, Reagan joked with Richard Nixon about Black people being monkeys. It’s on tape, so don’t take my word for it.
To pick a top 10 list of racist presidents, then, is no small feat.
Plus, not everyone agrees on what and whom they consider racist.
Still, there are 10 presidents who take the racist cake by any intellectually honest standard.
№10 Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–81)
Republican Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel Tilden in a controversial election decided by Congress and the Supreme Court. Hayes cared more about power than he did about Black people, so in order to win the presidency he agreed to withdraw troops from the South in 1877, knowing full well that would result in the denial of social and political rights for Black Americans who had been freed just a decade prior.
Hayes was warned that withdrawing troops would result in Black people being relegated to second-class citizens, and their behavior criminalized so they could be returned to servitude.
Hayes’s policy led to Southern laws that largely reversed improvements for Southern Blacks, which ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize separate but equal.
№9 James Polk (1845–49)
As America expanded westward in the mid-1800s, a mere three months after President Polk took office, he led the fight to expand slavery to the Pacific Ocean. The lifelong slaveholder was known by abolitionists as the leader of “Slave Power.”
President Polk was equally racist against Mexicans and supported white people possessing all the land when his administration waged the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). He was successful, too, because he seized from Mexico what is now the American Southwest. Even after the war, Polk turned a blind eye to white slaveholders seizing more land from Mexican American citizens.
The fact that Polk bought into the idea of white power solidly places him on this list.
№8 Woodrow Wilson (1913–21)
President Wilson easily makes the list. He oversaw the re-segregation of the federal government.
This included Wilson’s segregating his entire cabinet and every branch in government. He increased efforts to segregate the military. Even fought against women’s right to vote.
He also ignored various lynchings of Black people.
When the racist film “Birth of a Nation” (originally named “The Clansman”) was released, Wilson called it culturally accurate.
Wilson’s efforts went beyond segregation. He made sure Black federal workers were fired, and those who kept their jobs were forced into separate and unequal workspaces, separate lunchrooms, and even separate bathrooms. He refused to appoint Black ambassadors to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as was the custom of prior presidents.
Wilson is on record as backing what he called the “great Ku Klux Klan,” and supported the Klan’s violence against Black people in the South.
His racism extended beyond our borders, too, as he occupied Haiti in 1915 to prevent Haitians from self-determination.
To top it all off, at the Versailles Conference that ended World War I, Wilson rejected Japan’s proposal for a treaty recognizing racial equality, which extended European colonization in parts of the world.
№7 William Taft (1909–13)
No guesswork on William Taft, as he admitted he was a racist.
President Taft was so racist that in his inaugural speech, he announced he would not appoint Blacks to any federal posts, criticizing his fellow Republicans who had done so in the past. Instead, he actually appointed slavery-supporting ex-Confederate soldiers to the Supreme Court. This, by the way, was a driving motivation for Black Americans to begin switching from the Republican Party to the Democrats.
Taft also sent troops to Cuba to help quell a rebellion by Black Cubans fighting for their rights and took part in the slaughter of thousands of Black Cubans.
№6 James Monroe (1817–25)
A significant slaveholder, Monroe was a vocal supporter of the formation of the American Colonization Society, which was on record with a policy of, as Henry Clay put it, “ridding our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous [Black population],” and redeeming Africa “from ignorance and barbarism.” Yep, he coined “shithole countries” long before 45.
Monroe even sent in the military to seize a strip of coastal West Africa so he could ship Black people to Africa. This first American colony in Africa later became what is today “Liberia,” and its capital was named none other than “Monrovia.” True story.
Coined “The Monroe Doctrine,” the policy was used by Monroe and many other presidents to rationalize U.S. intervention into other non-white countries in Latin America.
Incidentally, in 2013, President Obama’s administration declared to the Organization of American States the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
№5 Franklin Roosevelt (1933–45)
This one may come as a surprise to some, as FDR is known as sort of the father of the modern Democratic Party, and his wife Eleanor was vocal about civil rights.
But let’s not kid ourselves. President Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942 to round up and imprison more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II ranks as one of the more racist policies in American history (note, he didn’t do the same thing to German and Italian Americans at the time).
FDR also was well aware of the horrors taking place in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, yet he stood by silently as Jews were murdered by the millions. Only after Pearl Harbor was bombed did FDR decide to get involved in the war.
FDR’s views on race weren’t subtle. He invited several white American competitors to the White House after the 1936 Olympics. But not four-time gold medalist Jesse Owens.
Even worse, in his famous New Deal, FDR’s housing component specifically embedded “Black Codes” that promoted discrimination against African Americans. Black neighborhoods got coded as being unsuitable for new mortgages.
The New Deal also excluded Southern agriculture, which was Black Southerners’ main vocation at the time. And he made sure that Southern whites got to administer handing out relief to people impacted by the Great Depression. Wanna take a stab at who was left out of that relief?
As a result of the racism baked into FDR’s New Deal, Black Americans endured the impact of the Great Depression long after the 1930s, while the white middle class exploded in size.
FDR bears responsibility for continuing generational poverty for many Black Americans.
№4 Andrew Jackson (1829–37)
Populist President Andrew Jackson was a wealthy Tennessee enslaver and military general who founded the Democratic Party. The party initially consisted of enslavers, white working laborers, and new European immigrants. His followers were regular rioters and protesters against abolitionists and Black communities, even post-Civil War. The original racist rallies!
When abolitionists began mass mailings of antislavery publications in 1835, President Jackson asked Congress to pass a law prohibiting “under severe penalties, the circulation … of incendiary publications.” That’s right. So racist that he viewed advocating for the abolition of slavery as incendiary! Jackson followed up by making sure Congress had a “gag rule” that indefinitely tabled all anti-slavery petitions in Congress.
But that’s not all that landed him №4 on the list. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced Native American nations to relocate from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi River to make way for more enslaved Africans to be sent to the South. He ordered the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans in the process.
Jackson didn’t hide his racist views, so there’s no debating this one.
№3 Richard Nixon (1969–74)
Nixon ranks high on the list because he lived in an era of great positive change in racial awareness, and didn’t come along for the ride. Recordings of Nixon confirmed he was racist and bigoted to his very core.
The examples are plentiful.
Nixon was so racist that he said that abortion is wrong except if it involves an interracial baby.
He regularly used ethnic slurs, such as the N-word and the K-word towards Jews.
White House tapes reveal he referred to women from India as “undoubtedly, the most unattractive women in the world.” Nixon called Indians “most sexless,” “nothing” and “pathetic.”
On one call, he mentioned that he wanted to fire his then-aide and lawyer, Leonard Garment, yelling, “God damn his Jewish soul!” Nixon said he didn’t want any more Jews in his administration. “No Jews. We are adamant when I say no Jews.”
In an Oval Office meeting, Nixon said that Black people couldn’t run Jamaica.
“Blacks can’t run it...and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand … Do you know, maybe one Black country that’s well run?”
It is well known now that Nixon also believed in well-debunked theories that certain races have higher or lower IQs.
The worst of Nixon’s racism was baked into his “law and order” policies to mass incarcerate and destroy what he decided were radical civil rights groups.
You know, those crazy radicals fighting for equality.
№2 Donald Trump (2016–20)
Like many of his predecessors, Trump really didn’t hide his racism.
He habitually gave the presidential nod to white supremacists — from his “There are good people on both sides” (of a Nazi and anti-Nazi protest), to inviting known white supremacists to Mar-A-Lago, to include in his administration racists such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon and others who regularly attended far-right extremist conferences.
This was followed by his incessant refusal to denounce white supremacists. He couldn’t even denounce ultra bigot David Duke, oddly claiming he didn’t know who he was.
There's so much more that can be attributed to the self-proclaimed least racist person, including his ban on diversity training in the federal government and all-out war on DEI.
Trump acolytes will of course dispute his making the list, but there’s no denying that he rehabilitated formerly on- the-fringe Nazis and racists and gave them a renewed voice to say and do whatever they want out loud.
Some conservatives may have liked his non-race-related policies, such as lower taxes for the rich, an abortion ban, and his “I’m crazy so don’t mess with me” foreign policy, but none of those justify or should allow a free pass for his racism.
№1 Andrew Johnson (1865–69)
There’s one president who’s even worse than Donald when it comes to racism.
Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, ironically became president after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln when the Civil War ended.
It didn’t take President Johnson long to show his true colors when he issued his Reconstruction plan a mere month into the presidency.
President Johnson’s first order of business was to extend a fig leaf to the defeated pro-slavery South. He granted amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the top Confederate officials. Even for the top brass, Johnson pardoned them a year later and returned land to them.
While busy making sure slavery enforcers got land, he then voided the Forty Acres and a Mule plan, which would have given former enslaved Black people a chance at building a life.
Then he removed Black troops from the South.
With their newfound hero in the White House (sound familiar?), emboldened Southern politicians passed a series of discriminatory Black codes to keep Blacks out of white society. They essentially replaced the slave master with the law. Numerous Black people and others lost their lives resisting these new policies. Johnson stood by while Klansmen and others paraded around the South.
President Johnson even vetoed federal efforts to end discrimination in the South, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which Congress eventually passed over his veto.
President Johnson opposed the passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides that no person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process, and he opposed the 15th Amendment, which provides voting rights to people regardless of race.
No due process for Black people. No voting rights for Black people.
You have to be a top-tier racist to take the positions Johnson did.
Mind you, this was all after slavery.
As we try to grapple with how to move America forward on race issues, let’s understand that generations have suffered at the hands of these presidents who shaped our American systems and policies.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.