Who Was North America’s 1st Black President?
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By Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root
100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: He’s sometimes called the “Abraham Lincoln” of his nation.
That would be Barack Obama, right? While most of us have assumed this,… it turns out that this is not true. As a matter of fact, the first black president in North America was a man named Vicente Guerrero, and he became the second president of the Republic of Mexico in 1829….
Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico)
In other words, Mexico had its own Barack Obama 54 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and fully 179 years before we did! And the comparison with Lincoln is not an idle one: Guerrero, like Lincoln, has been immortalized for abolishing slavery in Mexico….
On September 16, 1829 — Mexico’s Independence Day — Guerrero abolished slavery throughout the country, which has led many historians to refer to him as the “Abraham Lincoln of Mexico,” though Lincoln more properly should be referred to as “the Vicente Guerrero of the United States.” (And this action, by the way, was part of the reason that Texans fought to secede from Mexico a few years later, in 1836; remember the Alamo? That’s in part what Davy Crockett and his compatriots were fighting about in that Disney series we watched as children, but Disney left out the role of slavery!) And like Lincoln, Guerrero suffered for his actions: Three months after abolishing slavery, he was driven out of office.
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So was his father Mexican and his mother Black? cuz his name is Guerrero
Vicente Guerrero’s mother was native to the region, his father, Pedro, was of African blood, some say he was of mixed blood. Many of the Spanish crown subjects had Spanish surnames such as Guerrero. In the US of a there are many Blacks with surnames of Smith Jones and Washington.
Additionally, there was no country named Mexico, therefore there were no Mexicans in the first part of the 1800s. Mexico didn’t become a country until 1821. Prior to 1821 it was named New Spain.