Report: These Arizona politicians have ancestral ties to slaveholders
Rep. Andy Biggs and former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick are among 100 American political leaders who have slaveholding ancestors, according to a report from the news agency Reuters.
Biggs, R-Ariz., is five generations removed from Robert Mosely, who enslaved 44 Black people, Reuters reported, and Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., who retired from Congress earlier this year, is five generations removed from William J. Kirkpatrick, who enslaved five.
Neither responded to comments from Reuters or The Arizona Republic.
The investigation found that 100 of the 117th Congress’s 536 members descended from slaveholders and that every living former president, except for Donald Trump, are direct descendants of slaveholders. Trump’s family came to America after slavery was abolished.
The Reuters report found that two of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, are direct descendants, too.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard University who focuses on African and African American research told Reuters that people should use these discoveries as learning opportunities.
“This is a learning opportunity for each individual. It is also a learning opportunity for their constituency … and for the American people as a whole.”
According to Reuters, the examination “reveals for the first time, in breadth and in detail, the extent of those leaders’ ancestral connections to what’s commonly called America’s “’original sin.’”
Lineages of the political elite were traced through the assembly of thousands of pieces of information, including U.S. census records, antebellum tallies of enslaved people, tax documents, estate records, family bibles, newspaper accounts, birth and death certificates and family wills.
The late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also has lineage to slaveholders. His great-great grandfather, William Alexander McCain, owned a plantation and died during the Civil War as a soldier in the Mississippi cavalry. He owned 52 slaves, according to reporting by Salon.
“I knew we fought in the Civil War,” McCain, who died in 2018, told Salon at the time. “But no, I had no idea (that they were slaveholders). I guess when you really think about it logically, it shouldn’t be a surprise.”