Report: Kamala Harris’s Ancestors Owned Slaves, Too

The ancestors of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) owned slaves — according to her father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris.

The information was reported Wednesday by the Washington Free Beacon, citing a genealogical report written by Harris’s father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris.

The Free Beacon noted:

Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor, revealed in 2018 that his grandmother was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in northern Jamaica.

“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” he wrote in a post for Jamaica Global.

…

A research archive of Jamaican records indicate that at one point in 1817, Hamilton Brown owned scores of slaves. The majority were brought in from Africa, though he also owned many Creole slaves.

Harris is among the leading contenders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. If elected next year, she would become the first black female president — and the first Asian-American president, she has claimed, based on her mother’s Indian origins.

NBC News reported Monday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was descended from slave owners.

In a report titled “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s great-great-grandfathers owned 14 slaves, bringing reparations issue close to home,” NBC noted:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said recently he opposes paying government reparations to the descendants of American slaves, has a family history deeply entwined in the issue: Two of his great-great-grandfathers were slave owners, U.S. census records show.

The two great-great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned a total of at least 14 slaves in Limestone County, Alabama — all but two of them female, according to the county “Slave Schedules” in the 1850 and 1860 censuses.

In his defense, McConnell noted that former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, had ancestors on his mother’s side who were slave owners.
The New York Post reported that McConnell also noted that Obama also opposed reparations.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.