House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said his ancestral ties to slavery do not reflect his work toward a “colorblind society.”
A recent examination from Reuters found at least three of Johnson’s direct ancestors were slaveholders.
“As has been well-documented, the horrific legacy of slavery touches the ancestry of political leaders across the spectrum, including Presidents Biden and Obama,” Taylor Haulsee, a spokesperson for Johnson, said in a statement to The Hill. “But the actions of people who lived hundreds of years ago do not have any bearing on the Speaker’s lifelong work for a colorblind society.”
Reuters has conducted reports on the ancestry of many elected officials. The organization has found at least 100 lawmakers who descended from slaveholders. President Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch are among leaders with ties to slavery. Former President Obama descends from a slaveholder from his white mother’s family.
The report found that Johnson’s ancestor, Honore Fredieu, enslaved 14 Black people, including a pair of 1-year-old girls, in Natchitoches, La., in 1860. Amedee Rachal, another ancestor, enslaved four people.
Fredieu and Rachal were great-great-great-great-grandfathers of Johnson; their children married each other. Rachal’s father, Cyprian Rachal, enslaved 10 people, Reuters reported.
Johnson and his wife, who are both white, took in a Black son, Michael, when he was 14 after he was “out on the streets and nowhere to go and on a very dangerous path.”
The newly elected Speaker has mentioned Michael in the past, once at a 2019 hearing on reparations and another in a 2020 interview following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Johnson compared Michael’s life to the life of his white son, Jack, in the interview, saying the reality is that Michael “had a harder time than my son Jack is going to have simply because of the color of his skin.”