Monday, November 19, 2012

The Root: 'North America's First Black President?'


Vicente Guerrero (1850. Oil on canvas, by Anacleto Escutia. 
Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico)
[TheRoot.com]

John Malveaux of www.MusicUNTOLD.com sends this link:

Please see Vicente Guerrero
http://www.theroot.com/views/who-was-first-black-president

Thanks
John Malveaux

| Posted: November 5, 2012(The Root) -- Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 4: Who was the first black president in North America?

That would be Barack Obama, right? While most of us have assumed this, and while this has been widely reported in the media, it turns out that this is not true. As a matter of fact, the first black president in North America was a man named Vicente Guerrero, and he became the second president of the Republic of Mexico in 1829. (The first black head of state in the Caribbean was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who became the first governor-general of the Independent Republic of Haiti in 1804. Both Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion were elected as presidents of the divided republic of Haiti: Christophe in the north in 1806, Pétion in the south in 1807.) 

In other words, Mexico had its own Barack Obama 54 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and fully 179 years before we did! And the comparison with Lincoln is not an idle one: Guerrero, like Lincoln, has been immortalized for abolishing slavery in Mexico.


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