My Upcoming Novel, “Afterlife in Harlem,” features Bill Clinton and Alexander Hamilton

Coincidence? Did you know that many contemporaries of the Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton, thought he was half black and half white. According to the historian Ron Chernow, President John Adams, who was often at loggerheads with Hamilton, called him “That Creole Bastard.” Such perceptions of Hamilton’s ethnicity have lingered, because W.E. B. DuBois, the early 20th century scholar and activist dubbed him, “Our own Hamilton.”

Decades later, Nobel Prize winning novelists, Toni Morrison, for reasons having nothing to do with his racial background, labeled Bill Clinton, “Our First Black President.”

In another post, I’ll report on how these two seemingly disparate comments about these two American leaders, who lived centuries apart, are not dissimilar at all.