Kanye West once said, “George Bush doesn’t like black people.” I guess he has no idea how right he was.
According to MSN Now, new historical reports have revealed that a direct ancestor of former US presidents, George H.W. and George W. Bush was a notorious slave trader, who probably sailed to places like Nigeria in order to get cargo for his business.
While at least 25 U.S. presidents have been descendants of slave owners (and 12 of them owners themselves), Thomas “Beau” Walker, Dubya’s great-great-great-great-grandfather by his father’s mother, reportedly went well beyond owning.
According to genealogical findings, Walker was a slave ship captain involved in at least 11 slave-trading West African voyages between 1784 and 1792. Walker, called an “inhuman monster” by one British anti-slavery activist, died in 1797 when the crew on one of his vessels mutinied, killing him and throwing his body overboard.
The Bush family hasn’t commented yet on these findings.
The discovery of the slave-trading ancestor of the Presidents Bush was made by two men: Roger Hughes, a retired newspaper editor and genealogist in Illinois who has previously documented other Bush ancestors as slave owners in the United States, and Joseph Opala, an American historian who has spent much of his adult life in Sierra Leone, the former British colony on the West African coast.