Vice President Kamala Harris may have descended from an infamous Irish slave owner who actively worked against abolition.
The presidential hopeful’s paternal great-grandmother, Christiana Brown, appears to be a descendant of Hamilton Brown, “who is on the record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town, a town in Jamaica,” Harris’ father, Stanford economist Donald Harris, wrote in the Jamaica Globe in 2019.
Donald Harris, 85, was born in Brown’s Town, the vice president noted in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”
Hamilton Brown was born in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, in 1776, according to the University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.
He moved to the British colony of Jamaica when he was a teenager and later became a sugar-plantation owner.
“Hamilton Brown was a notorious figure and not a nice fellow,” historian Stephen McCracken told the Belfast Telegraph on Tuesday.
“He had numerous slaves. In fact, Hamilton Brown routinely traveled back and forth to London to protest the abolishment of slavery,” he noted.
Brown owned at least 124 and 121 slaves in 1817 and 1826, respectively, a Reuters fact check indicated.
The United Kingdom abolished slavery in 1833, but former slaves were bound to their owners until 1838, the Belfast Telegraph said.
Brown later received £24,144, or the equivalent of $3.7 million today, under the Slave Compensation Act of 1837, which paid off former slave owners as a compromise to secure abolition.
He died in 1843 and was buried in the Anglican graveyard in Brown’s Town, the Gleaner reported.
Hundreds of thousands of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans have Anglo or Irish ancestry because of the prevalence of sexual violence committed by plantation owners against their female slaves, the Belfast Telegraph noted.
As a result, Vice President Harris, 59, is likely descended from both slaves and slave owners, according to Reuters.
More than 100 US political elites – including five living presidents and two US Supreme Court justices – descended from slave owners, a 2023 survey found.
If Harris is elected in November, she also will also join a long line of Oval Office occupants with links to the Emerald Isle. Outgoing President Joe Biden, in particular, has been vocal about his family’s roots in Mayo and Louth in Ireland, the Belfast Telegraph noted.
Presidents Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Arthur, Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy also had Irish connections, Stephen McCracken said.
“There was so much migration over the years, I think over one-third of the population of the north left Ireland at one point,” he explained.
With Post wires
