A tall man who is part white, part East African who is a lawyer from Illinois ends up becoming the United States of America—I’m talking about Obama right?

by Teddy Fikre.  Posted:  Thursday, July 23, 2010


Try again, what if I said the person I am talking about is really Abraham Lincoln.  Sounds implausible right?  Of course we will never know for a fact, but there have always been rumors and hearsay that Abraham Lincoln was part African-American.  The story gets even more compelling.  According to stories that date back to the 19th century, the father of Abraham Lincoln’s mother—Nancy Hanks—was Ethiopian.

Has this been proven definitively?  Not yet, but back then, admitting that you have black blood in you would have been a sure career-ender for coach driver let alone an aspiring politician.  Of course, it was denied for generations that Thomas Jefferson bore children from a slave he owned, until it was proven eventually that he did just that.

William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, said that Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and that his mother was from an Ethiopian tribe. In Herndon’s book entitled “The Hidden Lincoln” he says that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln’s father because he was sterile from childhood mumps and was later castrated.   Lincoln’s presidential opponents made cartoon drawings depicting him as a Negro and nicknamed him “Abraham Africanus the First.”

It is quite amazing the amount of similarities that Obama and Lincoln share.  They are both from Illinois, consider:

  • Obama was born 100 years after Abraham Lincoln became President (1861/1961).
  • Obama is inaugurated President 200 years after President Abraham Lincoln’s birth (1809/2009).
  • Obama and Abraham Lincoln were both lawyers who practiced law in the State of Illinois.
  • Obama and Abraham Lincoln were both US Senators representing the State of Illinois.

So we stand today, at the cusp of another crisis that threatens to engulf the United States.  Almost a century and a half ago, the threat was that of the dissolution of the union as Americans fought over states rights and the refusal to acknowledge African-Americans as human beings endowed the inalienable rights of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.  Today, we stand at the cusp of a lesser turmoil yet one that is shaping the future of the United States.  Tea party activists demand that America be “given back to them”; we face yet another decision of whether or not America is an inclusive society or an exclusive club.  It is a blessing we have another president who shares the temperament of Lincoln to guide us during this rough patch.  Who knows, they might share a lot more than a temperament and an Illinois background.