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.

The documented policy outcomes of the Trump administration produce the highest normalized score of any president in the modern era. That score is based on eight objective categories and one transparent subjective category.

The First Step Act of 2018 was not a symbolic gesture. It was the first federal law in American history to retroactively reduce sentences already being served. In plain terms: people already locked up got shorter sentences.

The data is unambiguous: 91% of the inmates who received early release under the Act were Black Americans (U.S. Sentencing Commission, “First Step Act Annual Report,” 2022). Out of every 100 people let out early, 91 were Black. The Act also eliminated the stacking provision of 18 U.S.C. 924(c) — a legal rule that piled extra prison time on top of existing sentences. That rule had been used to impose back-to-back mandatory minimums 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. Previous administrations had renewed that funding on a temporary basis. Trump made it permanent.

Black unemployment reached a recorded low of 5.4% in August 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Series LNS14000006, seasonally adjusted). That was the lowest rate ever recorded for Black workers. Not a talking point — a federal data point no prior administration had produced.

The Opportunity Zone program, created through the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, directed an estimated $75 billion in private investment into 8,764 census tracts (Economic Innovation Group, “Opportunity Zones Activity Report,” 2020). The majority of those areas had majority-Black or majority-minority populations. The program was imperfect — some zones attracted development that did not help existing residents. But the capital flow into previously ignored communities was documented and measurable.

The education score of 9 reflects the HBCU Act and the expansion of school choice initiatives. Those initiatives gave families alternatives in districts where Black students were trapped in failing schools.

The Platinum Plan, released in September 2020, was the largest campaign proposal ever aimed directly at Black American communities. It offered $500 billion in capital access, built around four pillars: Opportunity, Security, Prosperity, and Fairness.

The plan proposed 500,000 new Black-owned businesses. It called for a “Second Step Act” to build on the First Step Act’s criminal justice gains. It proposed designating the KKK and Antifa as terrorist organizations and making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

The plan emerged partly from consultation with Ice Cube and the Contract with Black America (CWBA). The CWBA was a policy document laying out specific economic and criminal justice priorities for Black communities. Under this framework’s methodology, the Platinum Plan is scored at 50% weight because it was formally proposed but not enacted.

Still, it represented a significant expenditure of political capital. It was the most detailed policy commitment to Black economic development ever included in a presidential campaign platform.

The Unseen Hand score of 5 reflects three things: the Platinum Plan’s ambition, the First Step Act’s documented results, and the willingness to engage directly with Black policy advocates outside traditional political channels.

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 (CFPB) — the federal agency that punishes banks and lenders who cheat customers — was the single most effective federal tool for going after 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. It partially offsets the gains made elsewhere. The framework scores both.

Ulysses S. Grant is the most surprising name in the top tier. His presence here reveals how thoroughly the historical record has been distorted by a century of Lost Cause mythology — the false narrative that the Confederacy fought for honor, not slavery. 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 a routine bureaucratic move.

It was the construction of a federal crime-fighting system built for one explicit purpose: destroying the Ku Klux Klan.

The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 — federal laws that gave the government power to prosecute anyone who used violence to stop Black people from voting — armed Grant with real legal weapons. Grant used that authority aggressively.

He suspended habeas corpus — meaning he gave the military power to arrest people without a trial — in nine counties in South Carolina in 1871. Federal troops arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned Klan members. The result was documented: the Klan was wiped out 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. It was the most ambitious civil rights law between the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He appointed Amos T. Akerman as Attorney General — a former Confederate soldier who turned around and 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 private citizens for violating the civil rights of other citizens — only states could do that — Grant did not push for new laws to close the gap. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 had left between 62 and 153 Black men dead in Louisiana. The Cruikshank decision meant no one would face federal prosecution for the killings.

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. The package included a federal anti-lynching law, abolition of the poll tax — a fee designed to stop poor Black citizens from voting — a permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee, and a federal civil rights division.

Congress blocked every proposal. But submitting these measures — scored at 50% weight under this framework — represented a political risk that no president since Grant had been willing to take.

Truman also created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in 1946. Its report, “To Secure These Rights,” laid out 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 a spy system that treated Black political organizing as a national security threat. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated Black leaders and organizations during his presidency. Those investigations scared Black activists into silence at a moment when their 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 banned racial discrimination in voting. It put federal monitors in charge of elections in places with histories of keeping Black voters away from the polls. Together, these two laws tore down the legal framework of racial apartheid — segregation written into law — 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, federal education funding, anti-poverty initiatives, and Model Cities — were producing documented improvements in Black education, employment, and housing. Then Vietnam consumed the federal budget and the national attention.

More than $25 billion was diverted from domestic programs to fund the war. That money was supposed to fund schools, jobs, and housing in Black communities. Instead it funded bombs. 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. 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 laws were designed to protect.

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. Their mission: escort nine Black students into Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus had mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to block the students from entering. It was the first time since Reconstruction that a president had used military force to protect the civil rights of Black Americans.

Armed paratroopers flanking Black teenagers walking into a public school. That image remains one of the most powerful demonstrations of federal authority used to defend 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.

Congress deliberately weakened the bill. But its passage broke an 82-year drought on civil rights legislation. It also built the institutional infrastructure that Kennedy and Johnson would later use to pass far stronger laws.

The failure is equally documented. Brown v.

Board of Education was decided in 1954. Eisenhower made no systematic effort to enforce it. School desegregation beyond Little Rock moved at a crawl. 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 understood the moral case for desegregation but lacked the conviction to pursue it beyond one 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. For all its flaws, the law imposed the first federal requirement that schools break down test scores by race. For the first time, the Black-white achievement gap was visible in federal data.

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.

FEMA deployment to the Lower Ninth Ward was delayed by days. Black residents drowned, waited on rooftops, and died in the Superdome. A president who saved a million African lives abroad failed to protect Black American lives at home during a natural disaster. That contrast 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 — more than all previous presidents combined — changed the makeup of the institution most responsible for interpreting civil rights law.

These judges served for decades after Carter left office. They shaped 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 — the toxic combination of rising prices and a stagnant economy — pushed Black unemployment above 14% during Carter’s term. That was double the white rate and the highest since the Great Depression.

The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 was supposed to make full employment a federal policy goal with enforceable targets. But Carter failed to fight for the enforcement rules that would have given the law real teeth. The Act became a statement of good intentions rather than a binding policy. Black unemployment remained catastrophically high throughout his term.

Richard Nixon’s placement in the top ten will challenge readers who know him mainly for the Southern Strategy — his deliberate appeal to white racial resentment to win Southern votes. 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. That record 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 companies with federal contracts to meet specific percentage goals for minority hiring. It was the first time the federal government had put hard numbers on who these companies had to hire.

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 executive pressure, Justice Department enforcement, and a powerful lever: threatening to cut off federal money to schools that refused to integrate. 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 minor changes he could present as different. The end result was the same: the Act reversed Wards Cove Packing Co. v.

Atonio and other Supreme Court decisions that had made it harder to prove workplace discrimination. Before those rulings, employers had to prove their hiring practices were fair. After, employees had to prove they were unfair — a much harder task. For Black workers trying to prove discriminatory hiring or promotion practices, the 1991 Act restored the legal framework that made such cases winnable.

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 words. But it was unmistakably racial in its intent and effect.

The strategy proved that Black criminality could be used as an electoral weapon. Its success guaranteed that future campaigns would copy the playbook. 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. Kennedy gets credit for the political risk of submitting the bill. He does not get credit for the legislative achievement of its passage.

That distinction matters. Kennedy submitted the Civil Rights Act in June 1963. He moved only after the Birmingham campaign — where police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on peaceful demonstrators — made inaction politically impossible.

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. That gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover the legal cover to run the most invasive surveillance operation ever aimed at an American civil rights leader.

The surveillance continued for years after Kennedy’s assassination. But the authorization started 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’s Medicaid expansion. 2.1 million Black Americans gained health coverage. But the same presidency 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, Table H-5, inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars).

Black homeownership dropped from 46.1% to 41.2% during his tenure (Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership Survey, Table 22, 2009 vs. 2016). That was the steepest decline since the Fair Housing Act. The HAMP program — the Home Affordable Modification Program — was designed to prevent foreclosures. But its rollout prioritized keeping banks happy over keeping families in their homes. Black homeowners, who had been disproportionately targeted by predatory subprime loans, were disproportionately denied help.

The Unseen Hand score of 1 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 raised on 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. Lincoln actively sought to remove Black Americans from the United States. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime military tactic, not a moral declaration. And he 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. He told them directly: Black and white Americans could not live together. 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. 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. He did not appoint transformative figures. He 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 hardest. But the recession started before he took office, and his tools to fix 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.

Joe Biden entered office with more documented promises to Black Americans than any president in modern history. He left with one of the widest gaps between promise and delivery. The HBCU investment was real and substantial — $2.7 billion for facilities (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Pub. L. 117–58, November 2021) at institutions that had been 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 group. A 130% rise. That crisis received minimal attention from an administration that framed opioids primarily as a rural white problem.

The Unseen Hand score of 1 — the lowest in this tier — reflects the gap between the administration’s racial justice promises and its documented racial outcomes.

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 — meaning crack was punished 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine — 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 compounded across generations: families torn apart, jobs impossible to find after release, and the loss of voting rights in states that stripped the franchise — the right to vote — from anyone with a felony conviction.

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.

Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first Black president.” The framework does not score cultural affinity. It scores policy outcomes.

The 1994 Crime Bill is the single most destructive piece of legislation for Black Americans in the modern era. Three-strikes rules meant a third felony conviction triggered an automatic life sentence. Mandatory minimums took sentencing power away from judges. Pell Grants — federal money that let prisoners earn college degrees — were eliminated for incarcerated people. And $9.7 billion went to building new prisons. The result: an incarceration wave that removed hundreds of thousands of Black men from their families, communities, and economic life.

Clinton signed it with support from the Congressional Black Caucus. That fact does not change the documented outcomes.

The homeownership gains are real and significant. CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) enforcement under Clinton produced the highest Black homeownership rate in American history.

But many of those gains were built on subprime lending — high-risk mortgages with rising interest rates that borrowers could not sustain. When those loans collapsed in the 2008 financial crisis, the very wealth that had been created was destroyed.

The Safety score of 1 is the lowest of any modern president. It 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 how large that harm was and how long it lasted.

Benjamin Harrison represents the last gasp of Reconstruction-era commitment to Black voting rights. The Lodge Bill would have placed federal monitors at polling stations across the South. It directly targeted the poll taxes (fees you had to pay before voting — designed to keep poor Black citizens from the ballot box), literacy tests, and violence that were systematically stripping Black voters of their rights.

Harrison submitted the bill. He had the votes.

He chose not to spend the political capital to force its passage. He prioritized tariff legislation instead. The failure of the Lodge Bill marked the effective end of federal protection for Black voting rights for 75 years. The next serious federal voting rights law would not come until 1965.

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 collective racial punishment aimed at decorated Black soldiers who had served their country. Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 men. He presented no evidence. He held no trial. He offered no appeal (Weaver, The Brownsville Raid, 1970; Senate Military Affairs Committee records, 1906–1908).

The Army did not reverse those 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 politics 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 kept. But 200 days is too short to assess what his administration would have produced.

Calvin Coolidge presided over economic prosperity that largely bypassed Black Americans. The Roaring Twenties built wealth in white communities. Meanwhile, the Great Migration was moving millions of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities. There they faced housing discrimination, job barriers, and racial violence.

Coolidge took no action on any of these fronts. The Immigration Act of 1924 wrote racial hierarchy into federal law. It ranked immigrants by national origin, favoring white Europeans and excluding non-white people. That principle — that the United States was designed as a white nation — gave legal backing to the exclusion of Black Americans from full citizenship.

Chester Arthur inherited the presidency after Garfield’s assassination and produced a modest record. The Chinese Exclusion Act set a federal precedent: racial identity could be used as the legal basis for keeping people out of the United States. In plain terms, the government declared that being the wrong race was reason enough to deny entry.

That principle was cited and expanded in later decades to justify the exclusion, segregation, and disenfranchisement of non-white Americans — including Black Americans.

Arthur kept the Black appointments he inherited. That is scored. But the absence of any new policy action keeps his ranking in the lower half of this tier.

Warren Harding spoke publicly against lynching when most politicians refused to even mention it. In 1921, he gave a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, calling for Black political and economic equality. That was a remarkable statement in the heart of the Jim Crow South.

But he failed to turn words into action. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House in January 1922 by a vote of 230–119 (H.R. 13, 67th Congress). It died in the Senate to a filibuster — a delay tactic where senators talked endlessly to block a vote.

Harding did not spend political capital to save it. The pattern defines his record: a president who saw the crisis facing Black Americans, said the right things, and chose not to act.

William McKinley presided over a period when racial terror lynching reached epidemic levels across the South. An average of 100 Black Americans were lynched every year during his presidency (Tuskegee Institute, Lynching Records, 1882–1968). Black leaders directly asked him to use federal power to stop the killing.

He refused. The framework scores his maintenance of some Black Republican patronage appointments. It scores the heroism of Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War. But neither compensates for the deliberate choice to let the extrajudicial murder of Black Americans continue without a federal response.

Franklin Roosevelt’s twenty-fourth-place ranking will challenge the popular narrative. Most people think of the New Deal as an engine of progress. But the New Deal was not designed for Black Americans. It was designed to exclude them.

The Social Security Act left out agricultural and domestic workers — job categories that covered 65% of the Black workforce. That meant most Black workers got no retirement benefits and no survivor benefits. The Wagner Act (which gave workers the right to unionize) let unions exclude Black members. The FHA’s redlining maps — where the government literally drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and labeled them too risky for loans — locked in housing segregation that would define American cities for the next century.

Executive Order 8802 is the honest counterweight. It was the first time the federal government banned 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. Its enforcement was limited. Roosevelt also refused to support anti-lynching legislation. He told NAACP leader Walter White directly: 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 ran a “Southern Strategy” sixty years before Nixon. He cut Black appointments and courted white Southern voters by showing he was willing to abandon Black Republican supporters.

Removing Black federal officials had practical consequences. Those officials had been visible proof of the federal government’s commitment to racial equality. Taking them away sent a clear signal to Southern states: 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 run by state and local officials. Those officials directed jobs and resources to white applicants first.

Black unemployment during the Depression reached an estimated 50% in many cities (Sundstrom, William A., “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers During the Great Depression,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 52, No. 2, 1992). That was double the white rate. Half of Black workers in some cities had no job and no income.

Hoover’s administration took no action to ensure fair distribution of federal relief. His early Black appointments were quietly reversed under Southern pressure. This completed the Republican Party’s abandonment of its Black constituency — a process that Taft had started.

John Adams did not enslave people. That distinction, unique among the first five presidents, earns him modest credit.

But choosing not to own slaves is not the same as fighting slavery through policy. Adams signed no legislation limiting slavery. He proposed no restrictions on the slave trade during his term. He took no executive action to advance 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 (where he argued before the Supreme Court to free kidnapped Africans) and his years-long fight against the Congressional gag rule (a rule that automatically blocked any petition about slavery from being discussed) — 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 — the deal that ended Reconstruction by pulling federal troops out of the South — resolved the disputed 1876 election. Hayes got the White House. Black Americans lost federal protection.

Without troops to enforce their rights, four million Black Americans were left defenseless. What followed was ninety years of systematic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and racial terrorism. The appointment of Frederick Douglass does not compensate for the abandonment of four million people.

The Zero score of 8 reflects how massive the harm was and how long it lasted.

Zachary Taylor owned over 100 enslaved people but opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories. His motivation was political strategy, not moral conviction. Had he lived, his opposition to the Compromise of 1850 would have blocked the Fugitive Slave Act — a law that required people in free states to help capture and return escaped slaves. But Taylor died in July 1850. His death 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.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal. He owned more than 600 of them. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was a meaningful policy action — it shut down the pipeline of kidnapped Africans being brought to the United States.

But it did nothing for the millions already enslaved. Jefferson’s personal conduct — including his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was legally his property and could not consent — represents the most documented individual hypocrisy in presidential history.

The three-fifths compromise — a rule that counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for political representation — was a system Jefferson helped design. It gave slave states more seats in Congress without giving enslaved people any rights. Slaveholders gained political power from the very people they held in chains.

The framework scores the slave trade ban and penalizes everything else.

James Monroe signed a compromise that limited slavery in one direction and expanded it in the other. The Missouri Compromise drew a geographical line across the country. Slavery could not spread north of it — but was explicitly authorized to spread south.

Monroe owned 75 enslaved people. He supported colonization — a plan to send free Black Americans to Liberia (a country named after him) instead of granting them equal rights at home. The colonization movement was framed as charity. In practice, it was designed to remove free Black Americans from the United States rather than include them in it.

Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms. He produced no positive action for Black Americans in either one. He actively opposed civil rights legislation. He returned captured Confederate battle flags to Southern states as a gesture of national “healing” — at the expense of Black dignity. And he watched the Jim Crow system solidify across the South without objection.

Cleveland’s presidency completed the federal government’s abandonment of Black Americans. Hayes started it with the Compromise of 1877. Cleveland finished it.

George Washington is the father of the country. He owned 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 — a law that required people in free states to help capture and return escaped slaves — created a federal mechanism for slaveholders to recover enslaved people who had fled to freedom. It established a stark principle: the property rights of white slaveholders outranked the freedom of Black Americans, no matter what state they reached.

Washington freed the enslaved people he personally owned in his will — but only upon the death of his wife, not during his own lifetime. The framework scores presidential policy, not posthumous gestures.

James Madison designed the constitutional mechanism that turned enslaved Black Americans into political power for the men who enslaved them. The three-fifths compromise — a rule that counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for political representation — did not recognize Black humanity at three-fifths. It weaponized Black existence.

Every enslaved person gave slave states more seats in Congress. The enslaved people themselves got zero rights. Madison owned over 100 enslaved people. He took no presidential action to limit or restrict slavery during his two terms.

His presidency produced a net negative score. The constitutional infrastructure he built actively harmed Black Americans for generations.

Martin Van Buren enforced the Trail of Tears — the forced march that removed Native Americans from their land and killed thousands. He opposed the abolition movement. He strengthened the legal tools for returning escaped enslaved people to bondage.

The Amistad case provides modest offset. His administration initially supported the kidnapped Africans’ claims to freedom. But Van Buren later tried to send them back to avoid a diplomatic fight with Spain. The pattern is clear: humanitarian principles applied selectively and abandoned when politically inconvenient.

Millard Fillmore signed the most aggressively pro-slavery law of the pre-Civil War era. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did not merely allow slaveholders to recover escaped enslaved people. It required Northern citizens to actively help capture them.

Federal commissioners — the officials who decided each case — received $10 for each person returned to slavery and $5 for each person freed (Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 9 Stat. 462, Sec. 8). That is a direct financial incentive to rule against freedom. The system was rigged by design.

The law made the entire United States complicit in slavery. It eliminated the safety that free states had previously offered 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 — meaning Black and white employees had been working together in government offices for fifty years.

Wilson re-segregated it — he brought back racial separation in federal offices that had been integrated for decades. Black federal employees who had worked alongside white colleagues were moved to separate offices, given separate facilities, and in many cases fired.

Wilson then screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. The film depicted Black Americans as violent predators and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of white civilization. A White House screening gave the film presidential endorsement. The Klan, which Grant had destroyed in the 1870s, re-emerged as a mass movement within two years. By 1924, it reached an estimated 4 million members (McVeigh, Rory, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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 — a proposed law that would have banned slavery in the newly acquired lands.

Polk was a slave owner who bought and sold enslaved people while serving as president. He used the power of the office to expand the geographical reach of slavery. The framework scores that expansion as a direct, measurable harm to Black Americans.

Andrew Jackson owned more than 150 enslaved people. He personally profited from the slave trade. He signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 — which forcibly relocated Native Americans from their land, creating a legal template that would later be used to justify removing other non-white communities.

The Indian Removal Act is scored here for two reasons. First, the direct harm to Native Americans. Second, the precedent it set: 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 let territories vote on whether to allow slavery — a formula called “popular sovereignty.” The result was not a peaceful vote. It was Bleeding Kansas — open warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers that moved the country closer to civil war.

Pierce also enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with particular aggression. He deployed federal marshals to capture escaped enslaved people and return them to bondage. His presidency actively expanded slavery’s reach and strengthened the legal machinery that held Black Americans in chains.

Andrew Johnson is tied for last place. 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. It provided food, housing, education, and legal help. Johnson killed it.

He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He pardoned more than 13,000 former Confederates (Amnesty Proclamations of 1865–1868; Dorris, Jonathan T., Pardon and Amnesty Under Lincoln and Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, 1953). Those pardons restored their political rights. The same men who waged war to preserve slavery reclaimed 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 the Dred Scott decision — the Supreme Court ruling that declared Black people were not citizens and had no rights. The Court’s exact words: Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Buchanan privately lobbied justices to support the ruling. The 1857 decision meant that Black Americans — whether enslaved or free — had no standing in federal court and no protection under the Constitution.

Buchanan then enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. He watched passively as Southern states seceded to preserve slavery. His presidency represents the complete abandonment of federal responsibility on the most fundamental question of human rights in American history.