Since presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, attacks on her heritage as an Asian American and Black woman have grown online.
Several Facebook posts, such as this one, seem to be trying to undermine her credibility among some voters by connecting Harris’ family to a slaveholder named Hamilton Brown.
"The American Left went from ‘defund the police’ & ‘remove all monuments to slave owners,’ to ‘let’s elect a cop whose family owned slaves in Jamaica,’ in less than 3 months," the post says.
Records and online genealogy archives suggest Harris’ great-great-great-grandfather was a slaveholder.
The ancestry claims of Kamala Harris’ father
On Jan. 13, 2019, Jamaica Global Online published an essay that Kamala Harris’ father, Donald J. Harris, wrote in 2018.
In "Reflections of a Jamaican Father," Donald Harris, an emeritus economics professor at Stanford University, recounts both his childhood in Jamaica and visits he made to the country with his own children. Recalling his family history, he also says that he is the descendant of a "slave owner" — Hamilton Brown, a man born in Ireland who enslaved people in Jamaica and managed plantations there.
"My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (nee Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town), and to my maternal grandmother, Miss Iris (nee Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me)," the essay reads. "The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town."
According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London, Hamilton Brown was an attorney and "resident slave-owner in Jamaica" who founded Brown’s Town in Saint Ann, Jamaica. He was born in County Antrim in Ireland and died on Sept. 18, 1843. A document held by the U.K. National Archives that shows Brown owned at least 121 slaves in 1826.