Ranking Every U.S. President by What They Actually Did for Black Americans

The number one ranking will produce the most immediate objection from the most readers. That reaction is itself the point of the framework. This ranking does not measure rhetoric, approval ratings, or cultural affinity. It measures documented policy outcomes. And the documented policy outcomes of the Trump administration, measured against the eight objective categories and one transparent subjective category, produce the highest normalized score of any president in the modern era.

The First Step Act of 2018 was not a symbolic gesture. It was the first federal legislation in American history to retroactively reduce sentences already being served. The data is unambiguous: 91% of the inmates who received early release under the Act were Black Americans. The Act also eliminated the stacking provision of 18 U.S.C. 924(c), which had been used to impose consecutive mandatory minimum sentences overwhelmingly on Black defendants. No prior administration — not Obama’s, not Clinton’s, not either Bush’s — had signed retroactive sentencing reform into law. The HBCU Reauthorization Act made permanent the annual federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities that previous administrations had renewed on a temporary basis. Black unemployment reached a recorded low of 5.4% in August 2019 — not a talking point, but a Bureau of Labor Statistics data point that no prior administration had produced.

The Opportunity Zone program, created through the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, directed $75 billion in private investment into 8,764 census tracts, the majority of which had majority-Black or majority-minority populations. The program was imperfect — some zones attracted development that did not benefit existing residents — but the capital flow into previously ignored communities was documented and measurable. The education score of 9 reflects not only the HBCU Act but also the expansion of school choice initiatives that provided alternatives in districts where Black students were trapped in failing schools.

He acted without the Black American vote and delivered measurable results anyway — that combination of political independence and documented outcome is rarer in the historical record than most are willing to acknowledge. The CFPB rollback is the honest Zero: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the single most effective federal tool for prosecuting the predatory lenders, payday loan operations, and discriminatory mortgage practices that extracted wealth from Black communities. Reducing its enforcement capacity by 75% was a documented harm that partially offsets the gains made elsewhere. The framework scores both.

Ulysses S. Grant is the most surprising name in the top tier, and his presence here reveals how thoroughly the historical record has been distorted by a century of revisionist Lost Cause mythology. Grant did not simply preside over Reconstruction. He weaponized the federal government against white supremacist terrorism with a precision and commitment that no subsequent president matched until the 1960s. The creation of the Department of Justice in 1870 was not an administrative reorganization. It was the construction of a federal prosecutorial apparatus whose explicit purpose was the destruction of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 gave the federal government authority to prosecute individuals who used violence or intimidation to prevent Black Americans from exercising their constitutional rights. Grant used that authority aggressively. He suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina in 1871 — deploying federal troops to arrest, prosecute, and imprison Klan members. The result was documented: the Klan was functionally destroyed as an organization during Grant’s presidency. Black voter participation in the South during Reconstruction reached levels that would not be seen again until after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the most ambitious civil rights legislation between the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He appointed Amos T. Akerman as Attorney General — a former Confederate who became the most aggressive federal prosecutor of the Klan in American history. The appointment score of 9 reflects not symbolism but the documented prosecutorial record of Grant’s appointees.

His failure after the Colfax Massacre is the honest Zero. When the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that the federal government could not prosecute individuals for violating the civil rights of other individuals — only states could — Grant did not seek new legislation to close the gap. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 had left between 62 and 153 Black men dead in Louisiana, and the Cruikshank decision ensured that no one would face federal prosecution. Grant’s failure to fight for legislative workarounds marked the beginning of the end of federal protection for Black Americans in the South.

Harry Truman bet his presidency on doing right by Black Americans and won — the last president who can honestly make that claim. Executive Order 9981, signed on July 26, 1948, desegregated the United States Armed Forces. The order was not a symbolic gesture timed for political advantage. It was issued four months before a presidential election in which Truman trailed badly, and it cost him the entire Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond launched his States’ Rights Democratic Party campaign explicitly in response to Truman’s desegregation order, carrying four Southern states in November.

Truman did not stop at the military. He proposed the first comprehensive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, including a federal anti-lynching law, abolition of the poll tax, a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee, and a federal civil rights division. Congress blocked every proposal. But the formal submission of these measures — scored at 50% weight under this framework — represented a political expenditure that no president since Grant had been willing to make. Truman also established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1946, whose report “To Secure These Rights” provided the policy blueprint that Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would eventually follow.

The two-year delay at the start of his presidency and the HUAC problem are real. Truman inherited an intelligence apparatus that treated Black political organization as a national security threat, and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Black leaders and organizations during his presidency suppressed Black political participation at a moment when that participation was critical. The Zero score of 3 reflects the limited duration and indirect nature of the harm compared to the deliberate policy actions scored in other categories.

Lyndon Johnson signed the two most consequential pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race in employment, public accommodations, and federally funded programs. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in voting and provided for federal oversight of elections in jurisdictions with histories of discriminatory practices. Together, these laws dismantled the legal infrastructure of racial apartheid that had governed American life since the end of Reconstruction. No honest framework can rank the president who signed these laws outside the top five.

But no honest framework can ignore Vietnam. The Great Society programs — Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, Model Cities — were producing documented improvements in Black education, employment, and housing when Vietnam consumed the federal budget and the national attention. More than $25 billion was diverted from domestic programs to fund the war. The Economic score of 5 reflects this reality: the programs Johnson created were transformative in design but starved of funding by the war Johnson chose to escalate. Black soldiers bore a disproportionate share of the combat burden, and the war itself eroded the political coalition that had made the Great Society possible.

The legislation outlasted the war’s damage. Fifty years later, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act remain the foundational legal protections for Black Americans. The Great Society programs that survived — Head Start, Medicaid, federal education funding — continue to serve disproportionately Black communities. Johnson ranks fourth, not first, because the framework penalizes the damage his war inflicted on the very communities his legislation was designed to serve. The laws were transformative. The war was devastating. Both are true.

Dwight Eisenhower sent paratroopers to protect Black children. That sentence alone places him in the top tier. On September 24, 1957, Eisenhower deployed 1,200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort nine Black students into Central High School after Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to block their entry. It was the first time since Reconstruction that a president had used military force to protect the civil rights of Black Americans. The image of armed paratroopers flanking Black teenagers walking into a public school remains among the most powerful demonstrations of federal authority deployed on behalf of racial justice in American history.

Eisenhower also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 — the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875. The Act created the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. It was deliberately weakened in Congress, but its passage broke an 82-year legislative drought on civil rights and established the institutional infrastructure that Kennedy and Johnson would later use to pass far more consequential legislation.

The failure is equally documented. Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, and Eisenhower made no systematic effort to enforce it. School desegregation beyond Little Rock proceeded at a pace so slow that by 1964 — a full decade after Brown — only 2.3% of Black students in the South attended integrated schools. Eisenhower’s private remarks to Warren reveal a president who intellectually understood the moral imperative of desegregation but lacked the conviction to pursue it beyond a single dramatic moment. The enforcement died after the cameras left Little Rock. The framework scores both the intervention and the abandonment.

George W. Bush appointed more Black Americans to senior policy-making positions than any prior president. Colin Powell served as Secretary of State — the highest-ranking Black official in American history at that time. Condoleezza Rice succeeded him. Rod Paige served as Secretary of Education. These were not symbolic appointments. Powell shaped post-9/11 foreign policy. Rice directed national security strategy. Paige oversaw the No Child Left Behind Act, which for all its flaws imposed the first federal requirement that schools disaggregate test score data by race — making the Black-white achievement gap visible in federal data for the first time.

PEPFAR remains the single largest health initiative by any nation targeting a disease that was devastating the African continent. The Katrina failure is equally documented and equally real. Federal Emergency Management Agency deployment to the Lower Ninth Ward was delayed by days while Black residents drowned, waited on rooftops, and died in the Superdome. The contrast between a president who saved a million African lives abroad and failed to protect Black American lives at home during a natural disaster is the central tension of the Bush record. The framework scores both without resolving the contradiction, because the contradiction is the record.

Jimmy Carter’s judicial appointments transformed the federal bench. Thirty-nine Black federal judges represented a structural change in the institution most responsible for interpreting civil rights law. These judges served for decades after Carter left office, shaping rulings on employment discrimination, voting rights, and criminal sentencing long after his single term ended. The appointment score of 8 reflects the lasting policy impact of these appointments rather than their symbolic significance.

The economic failure is the honest counterweight. Stagflation during Carter’s term produced unemployment rates above 14% for Black workers — double the white rate and the highest since the Great Depression. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 was designed to establish full employment as a federal policy goal with enforceable targets, but Carter failed to fight for the enforcement mechanisms that would have given the law operational power. The Act became an aspirational statement rather than an actionable policy, and Black unemployment remained catastrophically high throughout his term.

Richard Nixon’s placement in the top ten will challenge readers who associate his name exclusively with the Southern Strategy. The framework does not deny the Southern Strategy. It scores it as The Zero. But the framework also requires scoring what Nixon actually did in office, and what Nixon actually did includes the most aggressive school desegregation campaign in American history and the first federal affirmative action program with enforceable hiring targets. The Philadelphia Plan required federal contractors to meet specific percentage goals for minority hiring — the first time the federal government had attached numerical requirements to employment discrimination enforcement.

Between 1968 and 1970, the percentage of Black students attending all-Black schools in the South dropped from 68% to 8%. That transformation happened under Nixon. It happened through a combination of executive pressure, Justice Department enforcement actions, and the strategic use of federal funding leverage. Nixon did not publicize this record because it contradicted his political messaging to white Southern voters. The framework does not care about messaging. It cares about documented outcomes. The school desegregation numbers are among the most dramatic racial policy outcomes of any single administration.

George H.W. Bush initially vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, calling it a quota bill. He then signed a nearly identical version in 1991 after negotiating modifications that he could present as substantively different. The end result was the same: the Act reversed Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio and other Supreme Court decisions that had shifted the burden of proof in employment discrimination cases away from employers and onto employees. For Black workers attempting to prove discriminatory hiring or promotion practices, the 1991 Act restored the legal framework that made such cases viable.

The Willie Horton campaign strategy is one of the most documented uses of racial fear in American electoral history. The 1988 campaign advertisement featuring Horton — a Black man convicted of murder who committed assault and rape while on a weekend furlough program — was not explicitly racial in its text but was unmistakably racial in its intent and effect. The strategy established that Black criminality could be used as an electoral weapon, and its success ensured that subsequent campaigns would follow the template. The framework scores the legislation and the strategy separately because they produced separate outcomes.

John F. Kennedy proposed the legislation that became the most important civil rights law in American history. He did not sign it. He did not live to see it passed. Under this framework, proposals receive 50% weight of enacted policy, which means Kennedy receives credit for the political capital he spent in submitting the bill but not for the legislative achievement of its passage. That distinction matters. Kennedy submitted the Civil Rights Act in June 1963 after the Birmingham campaign and the televised violence against peaceful demonstrators made inaction politically untenable. For the first two and a half years of his presidency, Kennedy avoided civil rights legislation entirely.

The FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. is the documented Zero. Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s phone lines and offices in October 1963, providing J. Edgar Hoover with the legal cover to conduct the most invasive surveillance operation ever directed at an American civil rights leader. The surveillance continued for years after Kennedy’s assassination, but the authorization originated in his administration. Kennedy’s legacy on civil rights is one of potential rather than achievement — a president who pointed the federal government in the right direction but did not live long enough to be measured by results.

The eleventh-place ranking of the first Black president will be the second most controversial result in this framework, after the first. The controversy does not change the data. Barack Obama’s presidency produced the largest expansion of healthcare access for Black Americans in fifty years through the ACA Medicaid expansion. It also presided over the largest destruction of Black household wealth in recorded history. Both facts are documented. Both facts are scored. The framework does not grant bonus points for identity.

The economic numbers are the core of the problem. Black median household income fell from $35,954 in 2009 to $35,398 in 2014 (Census Bureau, inflation-adjusted). Black homeownership dropped from 46.1% to 41.2% during his tenure — the steepest decline since the Fair Housing Act. The HAMP program was designed to prevent foreclosures, but its implementation prioritized mortgage servicer compliance over homeowner relief, and Black homeowners — who had been disproportionately targeted by subprime lending — were disproportionately denied modifications. The Unseen Hand score of 3 reflects the gap between the symbolic power of the Obama presidency and the documented economic outcomes for the community it was expected to transform.

Abraham Lincoln’s twelfth-place ranking will shock readers who have internalized the mythology of the Great Emancipator. The framework does not deny the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment. It scores them. The Civil Rights score of 9 reflects the constitutional magnitude of abolishing slavery. But the framework also scores everything else — and everything else includes a president who actively sought to remove Black Americans from the United States, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime military measure rather than a moral declaration, and who provided no infrastructure for the economic survival of four million newly freed people.

The colonization effort is not a footnote. Lincoln allocated $600,000 in federal funds — the equivalent of roughly $20 million in current dollars — to resettle Black Americans in Central America and the Caribbean. He met with a delegation of Black leaders at the White House on August 14, 1862, and told them directly that Black and white Americans could not live together and that Black Americans should leave. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued five weeks later. The 13th Amendment was pushed through a hostile Congress with extraordinary political skill. Both actions coexist in the documented record, and the framework scores both without resolving the contradiction.

Gerald Ford was a caretaker president whose primary impact on Black Americans was the absence of active harm. He maintained existing civil rights enforcement without expanding it. He did not propose new legislation, did not appoint transformative figures, and did not produce measurable improvements in any category. The Nixon pardon is the defining act of his presidency in this framework — not because the pardon itself directly harmed Black Americans, but because it eliminated the legal process that would have produced a full public accounting of an administration whose racial policies were deliberately harmful.

Ford’s economic record was marked by recession and stagflation that hit Black workers disproportionately, but the recession predated his presidency and the tools available to address it were limited. The framework scores Ford as a president who did not make things worse and did not make things better — a maintenance-level performance that places him squarely in the middle of the mixed-record tier.

Ronald Reagan signed the holiday and signed the sentencing law. The MLK holiday created permanent national recognition of Black American contributions to the American project. The 100:1 crack-to-powder sentencing disparity created permanent damage to Black American communities. Five grams of crack — the form of cocaine prevalent in Black neighborhoods — triggered a mandatory five-year federal sentence. Five hundred grams of powder cocaine — the form prevalent in white neighborhoods — was required to trigger the same sentence. The disparity was not accidental. It was written into law with full awareness of the racial distribution of cocaine use.

The incarceration numbers speak for themselves. The federal prison population nearly doubled during Reagan’s presidency. Black men were incarcerated at rates that would eventually reach seven times the white rate. The downstream effects — disrupted families, eliminated employment prospects for returning citizens, disenfranchisement in states that stripped voting rights from felons — compounded across generations. Reagan’s Safety score of 2 is the lowest in this tier and reflects the documented devastation of the War on Drugs as executed under his administration.

Joe Biden entered office with more documented promises to Black Americans than any president in modern history and left with one of the widest gaps between promise and delivery. The HBCU investment was real and substantial — $2.7 billion for facilities at institutions that had been structurally underfunded for over a century. The appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court was historically significant. The appointment score of 7 reflects both Jackson and a broader pattern of Black appointments to senior positions.

The economic and safety scores tell a different story. Black inflation-adjusted wages declined during his term. The Black homeownership rate stagnated. Most critically, the fentanyl crisis driven by record-level illegal border crossings produced the steepest increase in Black overdose deaths of any demographic — a 130% rise that received minimal attention from an administration that framed the opioid crisis primarily as a rural white issue. The Unseen Hand score of 2 — the lowest in this tier — reflects the distance between the administration’s racial justice rhetoric and its documented racial outcomes.

Benjamin Harrison represents the last gasp of Reconstruction-era commitment to Black voting rights. The Lodge Bill would have provided federal oversight of elections in the South, directly confronting the poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence that were systematically disenfranchising Black voters. Harrison submitted the bill. He had the votes. He chose not to spend the political capital to force its passage, prioritizing tariff legislation instead. The failure of the Lodge Bill marked the effective end of federal protection for Black voting rights for 75 years.

Bill Clinton was called “the first Black president” by Toni Morrison. The framework does not score cultural affinity. The 1994 Crime Bill is the single most destructive piece of legislation for Black Americans signed in the modern era. Three-strikes provisions, mandatory minimums, and the elimination of Pell Grants for incarcerated people produced an incarceration wave that removed hundreds of thousands of Black men from their families, communities, and economic participation. Clinton signed it with the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, a fact that does not change the documented outcomes.

The homeownership gains are real and significant. CRA enforcement under Clinton produced the highest Black homeownership rate in American history. But many of those gains were built on subprime lending that would collapse in the 2008 financial crisis, destroying the very wealth that had been created. The Safety score of 1 is the lowest of any modern president and reflects the documented catastrophe of mass incarceration that the Crime Bill produced. The Zero score of 9 — the highest penalty in the modern era — reflects the scale and duration of that harm.

Theodore Roosevelt’s record is defined by a single dinner and a single injustice. The White House dinner with Booker T. Washington was a symbolic act with real political consequences — Roosevelt was savaged by the Southern press and never repeated the invitation. The Brownsville Affair was an act of collective racial punishment directed at decorated Black soldiers who had served their country. Roosevelt dismissed 167 men without evidence, without trial, and without recourse. The Army did not reverse the discharges until 1972 — sixty-six years later. The two acts define a president who recognized Black dignity in private but sacrificed Black soldiers in public when political convenience demanded it.

James Garfield served 200 days before his assassination. His documented record consists of appointments and stated intentions. He retained Frederick Douglass in a prominent federal role and signaled support for Black education funding. The framework can only score what was documented in those 200 days. Garfield receives credit for the appointments he made and the positions he maintained, but the brevity of his presidency prevents any assessment of what his administration would have produced.

Chester Arthur inherited the presidency from an assassinated predecessor and produced a modest record. The Chinese Exclusion Act established the federal precedent that racial identity could serve as the basis for legal exclusion from the United States — a principle that would be cited and expanded in subsequent decades to justify the exclusion, segregation, and disenfranchisement of non-white Americans including Black Americans. Arthur’s maintenance of existing Black appointments is scored, but the absence of any proactive policy action keeps his ranking in the lower half of this tier.

Calvin Coolidge presided over economic prosperity that largely bypassed Black Americans. The Roaring Twenties produced wealth concentration in white communities while the Great Migration was relocating millions of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities where they faced housing discrimination, employment barriers, and racial violence. Coolidge took no action on any of these fronts. The Immigration Act of 1924 codified racial hierarchy into federal law and reinforced the principle that the United States was designed as a white nation — a principle that supported the legal and social exclusion of Black Americans from full citizenship.

Warren Harding spoke publicly against lynching at a time when most politicians refused to acknowledge it. He delivered a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921 calling for Black political and economic equality — a remarkable statement in the heart of the Jim Crow South. But he failed to translate words into action. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House in 1922 and died in the Senate. Harding did not expend political capital to save it. The pattern of words without action defines his record: a president who acknowledged the crisis facing Black Americans and chose not to act on that acknowledgment.

William McKinley presided over a period in which racial terror lynching reached epidemic levels across the South. He received direct appeals from Black leaders to use the power of the federal government to stop the killing. He declined. The maintenance of some Black Republican patronage appointments and the heroism of Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War are scored, but they do not compensate for the deliberate choice to allow the extrajudicial murder of Black Americans to continue without federal response.

Franklin Roosevelt’s twenty-fourth-place ranking will challenge the narrative of the New Deal as an engine of racial progress. The New Deal was not designed for Black Americans. It was designed to exclude them. The Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, the Federal Housing Administration — each contained provisions that either explicitly excluded Black workers or produced racially discriminatory outcomes by design. The Social Security exclusion alone denied retirement and survivor benefits to 65% of Black workers. The FHA’s redlining maps institutionalized housing segregation that would define American cities for the next century.

Executive Order 8802 is the honest counterweight — the first time the federal government prohibited racial discrimination in employment. But Roosevelt signed it only under threat of a massive protest march organized by A. Philip Randolph. The order was reactive, not proactive, and its enforcement was limited. Roosevelt also refused to support anti-lynching legislation, telling NAACP leader Walter White that he could not risk losing Southern Democratic votes. The framework scores both the executive order and the deliberate exclusions. The exclusions were larger, more permanent, and more harmful.

William Howard Taft explicitly pursued a “Southern Strategy” sixty years before Nixon, reducing Black appointments and courting white Southern voters by demonstrating willingness to abandon Black Republican supporters. The reduction in patronage appointments had practical consequences: Black federal officials had served as visible evidence of federal commitment to racial equality, and their removal signaled to Southern states that the federal government would not challenge the Jim Crow order. Taft produced no significant positive action for Black Americans during his single term.

Herbert Hoover inherited the Great Depression and responded with policies that systematically excluded Black workers from relief. Federal work programs were administered by state and local officials who directed jobs and resources to white applicants first. Black unemployment during the Depression reached an estimated 50% in many cities — double the white rate — and Hoover’s administration took no action to ensure equitable distribution of federal relief. His early Black appointments were quietly reversed under Southern pressure, completing the Republican Party’s abandonment of its Black constituency that Taft had begun.

John Adams did not enslave people. That distinction, unique among the first five presidents, earns him modest credit. But personal abstention from slavery is not the same as policy action against it. Adams signed no legislation limiting slavery, proposed no restrictions on the slave trade during his term, and took no executive action to advance the cause of emancipation. His presidency demonstrated that personal morality without political action produces zero measurable change.

John Quincy Adams became one of history’s most passionate anti-slavery voices — after he left the presidency. During his four years in office, he took no action against slavery, proposed no legislation, and issued no executive orders. His later advocacy, including the Amistad case and his years-long fight against the Congressional gag rule on slavery petitions, were acts of a congressman, not a president. The framework scores presidential action. Adams’s presidential record is one of complete inaction on the defining moral issue of his era.

Rutherford B. Hayes traded the rights of Black Americans for the presidency. The Compromise of 1877 resolved the disputed 1876 election by giving Hayes the White House in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. The withdrawal ended Reconstruction and left Black Americans without federal protection against the systematic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and racial terrorism that would define the next ninety years. The appointment of Frederick Douglass does not compensate for the abandonment of four million people. The Zero score of 8 reflects the magnitude and duration of the harm.

Zachary Taylor was a slave owner who opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories — a position motivated by political strategy rather than moral conviction. His opposition to the Compromise of 1850 would have prevented the Fugitive Slave Act from becoming law, but his death in July 1850 removed the veto threat and opened the path for his successor, Millard Fillmore, to sign it. Taylor’s brief and contradictory record earns a minimal positive score.

William Henry Harrison served 31 days. He was a slave owner. No policy record exists to evaluate. The minimal positive scores reflect baseline constitutional protections that existed during his brief tenure rather than any action he took.

James Monroe signed a compromise that simultaneously limited and expanded slavery. The Missouri Compromise drew a geographical line that prevented slavery from spreading north — but explicitly authorized it to spread south. Monroe owned 75 enslaved people and supported the colonization of free Black Americans to Liberia, a country named after him. The colonization movement, while framed as philanthropic, was designed to remove free Black Americans from the United States rather than integrate them into it.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and owned more than 600 of them. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was a meaningful policy action — it closed the international pipeline of enslaved Africans to the United States. But it did nothing for the millions already enslaved, and Jefferson’s personal conduct — including his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, who was legally his property and could not consent — represents the most documented individual hypocrisy in presidential history. The three-fifths compromise, which Jefferson helped design, gave slaveholders disproportionate political power by counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment while granting them zero rights. The framework scores the slave trade ban and penalizes everything else.

George Washington is the father of the country and the owner of 317 enslaved people. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 restricted American ships from carrying enslaved people to foreign nations — a modest limitation on the trade that Washington himself profited from. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 created a federal mechanism for slaveholders to recover escaped enslaved people from free states, establishing the principle that the freedom of Black Americans was subordinate to the property rights of white Americans regardless of state boundaries. Washington freed the enslaved people he personally owned in his will — upon the death of his wife, not during his own lifetime. The framework scores presidential policy, not posthumous gestures.

Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms and produced no positive action for Black Americans in either. He actively opposed civil rights legislation, returned Confederate battle flags as a gesture of sectional reconciliation at the expense of Black dignity, and presided over the consolidation of the Jim Crow system without objection. Cleveland’s presidency represents the completion of the federal government’s abandonment of Black Americans that Hayes began with the Compromise of 1877.

James Madison designed the constitutional mechanism that converted enslaved Black Americans into political power for the men who enslaved them. The three-fifths compromise did not recognize Black humanity at three-fifths. It weaponized Black existence to amplify slaveholder representation in Congress. Madison owned over 100 enslaved people and took no presidential action to limit or restrict slavery during his two terms. His presidency produced a net negative score because the constitutional infrastructure he built actively harmed Black Americans for generations.

Martin Van Buren enforced the Trail of Tears, opposed the abolition movement, and strengthened the legal mechanisms for returning escaped enslaved people. The Amistad case provides modest offset — his administration’s initial position supported the Africans’ claims to freedom, though Van Buren later attempted to return them to avoid diplomatic conflict with Spain. The contradiction between the Amistad position and the Trail of Tears enforcement defines a presidency that applied humanitarian principles selectively and abandoned them when politically convenient.

Millard Fillmore signed the most aggressively pro-slavery legislation of the antebellum era. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did not merely allow slaveholders to recover escaped enslaved people. It required Northern citizens to actively participate in their capture. Federal commissioners received $10 for each person returned to slavery and $5 for each person freed — a financial incentive to rule against freedom. The law made the entire United States complicit in slavery and eliminated the safety that free states had previously provided to escaped enslaved people. The Zero score of 9 reflects the magnitude of this legislation.

Woodrow Wilson is the only president in this ranking who actively reversed existing racial progress. The federal workforce had been integrated since Reconstruction. Wilson segregated it. Black federal employees who had worked alongside white colleagues for decades were moved to separate offices, given separate facilities, and in many cases dismissed. Wilson then screened Birth of a Nation at the White House — a film that depicted Black Americans as violent predators and the Klan as heroic defenders of white civilization. The Klan, which Grant had destroyed in the 1870s, re-emerged as a mass movement within two years. Wilson earns the only perfect 10 Zero score in the Era 2 cohort. No other Era 2 president deliberately reversed racial progress on this scale.

John Tyler was a slave owner who used the presidency to expand slavery. The annexation of Texas added a massive slave state to the Union and set the stage for the Mexican-American War, which would expand slave territory further. Tyler produced zero positive scores in any category and earned a Zero of 7 for the deliberate expansion of the institution that enslaved Black Americans.

James K. Polk waged a war of territorial expansion that added 525,000 square miles of potential slave territory to the United States. He then blocked the Wilmot Proviso — the legislative attempt to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired lands. Polk was a slave owner who bought and sold enslaved people during his presidency and used the power of the office to expand the geographical reach of slavery. The framework scores the expansion of slavery as a direct, measurable harm to Black Americans.

Andrew Jackson owned more than 150 enslaved people, personally profited from the slave trade, and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 — legislation that established the federal precedent for the forcible removal of non-white populations from their land. The Indian Removal Act is scored here not only for its direct harm to Native Americans but for the template it created: the principle that the federal government could uproot entire communities of non-white people and relocate them by force. That template was applied to Black Americans through displacement, exclusion, and segregation for the next century.

Franklin Pierce reopened the question of slavery expansion that the Missouri Compromise had settled thirty years earlier. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed territories to decide the slavery question by popular sovereignty — a formula that produced the violent conflict of Bleeding Kansas and moved the country closer to civil war. Pierce also enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with particular aggression, deploying federal resources to capture escaped enslaved people and return them to bondage. His presidency actively expanded slavery’s reach and strengthened the legal infrastructure that held Black Americans in chains.

Andrew Johnson is tied for last place because no president worked harder to ensure that the end of slavery would not produce the beginning of equality. He vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau — the only federal agency designed to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He pardoned more than 13,000 former Confederates, restoring their political rights and enabling them to reclaim political power across the South. Johnson did not merely fail to help Black Americans. He actively and systematically dismantled every federal mechanism designed to protect them. The Zero score of 10 is the maximum penalty available in the framework.

James Buchanan endorsed a Supreme Court decision that declared Black Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States. The Dred Scott decision of 1857, which Buchanan privately lobbied justices to support, ruled that Black Americans — whether enslaved or free — had no standing in federal court and no rights under the Constitution. Buchanan then enforced the Fugitive Slave Act and watched passively as Southern states seceded to preserve slavery. His presidency represents the complete abdication of federal responsibility for the most fundamental question of human rights in American history.