- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to an NBC News report that his great-grandparents owned slaves by saying that both he and former President Barack Obama owned slaves and opposed reparations.
- "You know, I find myself in the same position as President Obama," he told reporters, according to Daily Wire editor Ashe Schow. "We both oppose reparations and we both are the descendants of slave owners."
- Two of McConnell’s great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned at least 14 slaves in Alabama in the 1800s, according to an NBC News records review.
- In June, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held a historic hearing over a resolution, H.R. 40, which would create such a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and reparations.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to an NBC News report that his great-grandparents owned slaved by saying that both he and former President Barack Obama owned slaves and opposed reparations for the descendants of slaves.
"You know, I find myself in the same position as President Obama," he told reporters, according to Daily Wire editor Ashe Schow. "We both oppose reparations and we both are the descendants of slave owners."
Two of McConnell’s great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned at least 14 slaves in Alabama in the 1800s, according to an NBC News review of historical census data.
NBC found that the 1850 census listed Daley as owning five female slaves in Limestone County, Alabama, and the 1860 census revealed that McConnell owned four female slaves, ages 1, 3, 4, and 25. The records indicate that most of the slaves listed in those censuses eventually ran away, according to the outlet.
Read more: Mitch McConnell, a vocal opponent of reparations, is a descendant of a family that owned slaves
In recent months, the debate over whether the descendants of slaves should receive reparations has become a hot topic on the 2020 campaign trail, with multiple candidates pledging to create commissions to study the issue of reparations if elected.
In June, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held a historic hearing over a resolution, H.R. 40, which would create such a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and reparations.
Prior the hearing, McConnell also invoked Obama in opposing reparations, claiming that America electing Obama as the US’ first African-American president was a form of compensating for slavery.
"I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, when none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea," McConnell said before the hearing. "We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president."
While Obama — whose father is Kenyan and mother was American — was first running for president in 2007, amateur genealogist William Reitwiesner found evidence that Obama’s ancestors on his mother’s side of the family owned slaves, The Guardian reported at the time.
According to the outlet’s reporting of Reitwiesner’s review of census records, George Washington Overall, Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather, and his great-great-great-great grandmother Mary Duvall recorded owning two slaves each in Kentucky in the 1850 census.
On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama opposed direct cash reparations, saying, "I have said in the past — and I’ll repeat again — that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed," in August of 2008.
At the end of his presidency in December 2016, Obama similarly expressed trepadation over the idea of reparations in an interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who authored an Atlantic cover story titled "The Case For Reparations" and appeared at the June hearing to testify in favor of H.R. 40.
"The bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts," Obama said of reparations. "And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year."
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Source: Business Insider – gpanetta@businessinsider.com (Grace Panetta)