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.

Rather than assessing rhetoric, approval ratings, or cultural affinity, this ranking evaluates documented policy outcomes. On that basis the Trump administration earns the highest normalized score of any modern president. The underlying score draws from eight objective categories and one transparent subjective category.

Far from a symbolic gesture, the First Step Act of 2018 became the first federal law in American history to retroactively reduce sentences already being served — people already locked up got shorter sentences.

Unambiguous data reveals that Ninety-one percent of the inmates who received retroactive crack cocaine sentence reductions under the Act were Black Americans (U.S. Sentencing Commission, “First Step Act Annual Report,” 2022). Of every 100 people whose sentences were shortened under the Act’s Fair Sentencing Act provisions, 91 were Black. The Act ended the in-case stacking of 18 U.S.C. 924(c) charges — a legal rule that piled extra mandatory minimums on top of existing sentences within a single proceeding — which 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 FUTURE Act (Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act, P.L. 116-57, December 2019) made permanent $255 million in annual federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Earlier administrations renewed that support only on a temporary basis — and the money lapsed briefly in late 2019 before Trump signed the permanent authorization.

Black unemployment reached a recorded low of 5.3% in August 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Series LNS14000006, seasonally adjusted). That marked the lowest rate ever recorded for Black workers. No prior administration had produced the federal data point — it was not a talking point.

The Opportunity Zone program — created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — attracted an estimated $75 billion in committed private capital into 8,764 designated census tracts (Economic Innovation Group, “Opportunity Zones Activity Report,” 2020; confirmed capital deployment was lower per GAO analysis). Most of those areas had majority-Black or majority-minority populations. Some zones drew development that bypassed existing residents, underscoring the program’s flaws. Still, capital reached previously ignored communities in ways both documented and measurable.

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

The Platinum Plan came out in September 2020 as the largest campaign proposal ever aimed directly at Black American communities. Offering $500 billion in capital access, it centered on four pillars—Opportunity, Security, Prosperity, and Fairness.

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

Consultation with Ice Cube and the Contract with Black America (CWBA) partly shaped the plan. Serving as a policy document, the CWBA detailed specific economic and criminal justice priorities for Black communities. This framework’s methodology assigns the Platinum Plan a 50% weight, reflecting its formal proposal without enactment.

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

The Unseen Hand score of 5 reflects the Platinum Plan’s ambition and the First Step Act’s documented results. It also captures the willingness to engage 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 honest Zero describes the CFPB rollback. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — 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.

The most surprising name in the top tier belongs to Ulysses S. Grant. His presence here shows just how thoroughly a century of Lost Cause mythology has distorted the historical record — the false narrative that the Confederacy fought for honor, not slavery. Grant did not simply preside over Reconstruction.

With a precision and commitment unmatched by any later president until the 1960s, he turned the federal government into a weapon against white supremacist terrorism. Creating the Department of Justice in 1870 went far beyond a routine bureaucratic step, establishing instead a federal crime-fighting system built for one explicit purpose: destroying the Ku Klux Klan.

The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 gave the government power to prosecute anyone using violence to stop Black people from voting. Those federal laws armed Grant with real legal weapons, which he wielded aggressively. He suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina in 1871, giving the military authority to arrest without trial. Federal troops then arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned Klan members. Documentation shows 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, which stood as 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.

The honest Zero stems from his inaction after the Colfax Massacre. After the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that only states could prosecute private citizens for violating others’ civil rights — the federal government could not — Grant never sought new laws to close the gap. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 left between 62 and 153 Black men dead in Louisiana, and the Cruikshank decision ensured no federal prosecutions 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 staked his presidency on advancing the rights of Black Americans and prevailed — the last president who can honestly make that claim. Executive Order 9981, signed on July 26, 1948, desegregated the United States Armed Forces. Far from a symbolic gesture timed for political gain, the order came four months before a presidential election in which Truman trailed badly. It also 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.

Beyond the military Truman did not stop. 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, yet submitting these measures—scored at 50% weight under this framework—represented a political risk that no president since Grant had been willing to take.

Also in 1946 Truman created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, whose report “To Secure These Rights” supplied the policy blueprint later followed by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

The two-year delay at the start of his presidency and the HUAC problem were genuine. Truman inherited a spy system that treated Black political organizing as a national security threat. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Black leaders and organizations throughout 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.

The two most consequential pieces of civil rights legislation in American history were signed by Lyndon Johnson. 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 and 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 overlook 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 even as Vietnam consumed the federal budget and the national attention.

More than $25 billion moved from domestic programs into the war effort — resources intended to create schools, jobs, and housing within Black communities instead paid for bombs. This diversion earns an Economic score of 5. Johnson’s initiatives carried transformative intent, yet the war’s escalation starved them of support while Black soldiers shouldered a disproportionate share of combat and the conflict dismantled the political coalition sustaining the Great Society.

Although the war inflicted damage, the legislation outlasted it. Fifty years later, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act remain the foundational legal protections for Black Americans, while 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.

Eisenhower deployed 1,200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 24, 1957. The troops escorted 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.

Armed paratroopers flank Black teenagers walking into a public school, an image that 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. It created the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Congress deliberately weakened the bill, yet 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.

Documentation of the failure runs just as deep. Brown v. Board of Education came down in 1954, yet Eisenhower never mounted any systematic push to enforce the ruling. Beyond Little Rock, school desegregation advanced at a crawl. By 1964 — a full decade after Brown — only 2.3% of Black students in the South attended integrated schools.

Private remarks Eisenhower made to Warren reveal a president who understood the moral case for desegregation but lacked the conviction to pursue it beyond one dramatic moment. 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 president before him. Serving as Secretary of State, Colin Powell stood as the highest-ranking Black official in American history at that time —

Condoleezza Rice succeeded him, and Rod Paige served as Secretary of Education.

These were appointments of real substance. Powell shaped post-9/11 foreign policy, Rice directed national security strategy, and Paige oversaw the No Child Left Behind Act. Despite its flaws the law created the first federal requirement for schools to break down test scores by race — and the Black-white achievement gap became 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.

FEMA took days to reach the Lower Ninth Ward. Black residents drowned while others waited on rooftops or died inside the Superdome. The contrast forms the central tension of the Bush record: a president who saved a million African lives abroad failed to protect Black American lives at home when natural disaster struck.

The framework scores both without resolving the contradiction, because the contradiction is the record.

Jimmy Carter’s judicial appointments transformed the federal bench as 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 remained on the bench for decades after Carter left office. Long after his single term ended, their rulings touched employment discrimination along with voting rights and criminal sentencing. Rather than any symbolic value, the appointment score of 8 underscores the lasting policy impact from these appointments.

An honest counterweight lies in the economic failure. Stagflation—the toxic combination of rising prices and a stagnant economy—pushed Black unemployment above 14% during Carter’s term, double the white rate and the highest since the Great Depression.

Intended to establish full employment as a federal policy goal with enforceable targets, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 fell short when Carter declined to push for the necessary enforcement provisions. Without those measures the legislation amounted to little more than a declaration of aspirations instead of an obligation. Black unemployment stayed catastrophically high for the duration of his term.

Many readers will find Richard Nixon’s place in the top ten surprising, given that they know him chiefly for the Southern Strategy — his deliberate appeal to white racial resentment to win Southern votes. The framework does not deny the Southern Strategy.

Though the framework scores it as The Zero, it also requires evaluating Nixon’s actual record in office — a record that features the most aggressive school desegregation campaign in American history and the first federal affirmative action program with enforceable hiring targets.

Requiring companies with federal contracts to meet specific percentage goals for minority hiring, the Philadelphia Plan marked 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 fell from 68% to 8%. Nixon oversaw the shift by applying executive pressure and directing Justice Department enforcement, notably by threatening to cut federal funds from schools that refused to integrate. He kept the record quiet because it clashed with his political messaging to white Southern voters.

Messaging is irrelevant to the framework, which instead emphasizes documented outcomes, and the school desegregation numbers rank 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.

After negotiating minor changes he could present as different, he signed a nearly identical version in 1991. The Act reversed Wards Cove Packing Co. v. and produced the same end result.

Atonio and other Supreme Court decisions had made proving workplace discrimination more difficult. Employers once had to show that their hiring practices were fair, yet the burden later shifted to employees, who had to establish unfairness — a considerably tougher assignment. For Black workers pursuing claims of discriminatory hiring or promotion, the 1991 Act reinstated the legal structure that allowed such cases to succeed.

American electoral history records few strategies as thoroughly examined as the Willie Horton campaign’s reliance on racial fear. Though the 1988 advertisement that highlighted Horton — a Black man convicted of murder who committed assault and rape while on a weekend furlough program — avoided direct racial wording, its purpose and results were clearly racial.

The strategy showed that Black criminality could function as an electoral weapon. Its success made clear that future campaigns would adopt the same approach. Because the legislation and the strategy produced separate results, the framework scores each on its own terms.

John F. Kennedy proposed the legislation that became the most important civil rights law in American history. He did not sign it.

Kennedy did not live to see it passed. Proposals receive 50% weight of enacted policy under this framework, so Kennedy gets credit for the political risk of submitting the bill but none for the legislative achievement of its passage.

That distinction matters. Kennedy submitted the Civil Rights Act in June 1963 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 documented FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. starts at zero. Wiretaps on King’s phone lines and offices received authorization from Attorney General Robert Kennedy in October 1963. That step gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover the legal cover to run the most invasive surveillance operation ever aimed at an American civil rights leader.

Surveillance persisted for years after Kennedy’s assassination, though authorization for it had begun during his administration. His civil rights legacy rests more on potential than on concrete achievement — that of a president who turned federal policy in the right direction yet never lived to be judged by lasting 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, with 2.1 million Black Americans gaining 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 being black.

At the heart of the issue lie the economic numbers. Black median household income fell from $35,954 in 2009 to $35,398 in 2014 (Census Bureau, Table H-5, inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars).

During his tenure Black homeownership fell from 46.1% to 41.2% (Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership Survey, Table 22, 2009 vs. 2016). This marked the steepest decline since the Fair Housing Act. Designed to prevent foreclosures, the HAMP program — the Home Affordable Modification Program — saw a rollout that 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.

Many readers raised on the mythology of the Great Emancipator will find Abraham Lincoln’s twelfth-place ranking surprising. 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.

The framework also scores everything else. Lincoln actively sought to remove Black Americans from the United States, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime military tactic rather than a moral declaration. He provided no infrastructure for the economic survival of four million newly freed people.

Far from a footnote, the colonization effort saw Lincoln allocate $600,000 in federal funds — the equivalent of roughly $20 million in current dollars — to resettle Black Americans in Central America and the Caribbean.

Meeting a delegation of Black leaders at the White House on August 14, 1862, he 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.

Extraordinary political skill pushed the 13th Amendment through a hostile Congress. Both actions coexist in the documented record, which the framework scores 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 proposed no new legislation and appointed no transformative figures, nor did his tenure produce measurable improvements in any category. In this framework the Nixon pardon stands as the defining act of his presidency — 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 featured recession and stagflation that struck Black workers hardest. The downturn had already begun before he took office, however, leaving him with limited tools to address it. 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.

Entering office with more documented promises to Black Americans than any president in modern history, Joe Biden nevertheless left one of the widest gaps between promise and delivery. The HBCU investment was real and substantial — $2.7 billion through the American Rescue Plan’s Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund at institutions that had been underfunded for over a century.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s appointment to the Supreme Court proved historically significant, since 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.

While the Black homeownership rate stagnated, 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-to-1 crack-to-powder sentencing disparity inflicted permanent damage on Black American communities by punishing crack 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine. Five grams of crack, the form 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. As the downstream effects compounded across generations, families were torn apart, jobs became impossible to find after release, and states 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 stands as the single most destructive piece of legislation for Black Americans in the modern era. Three-strikes provisions triggered automatic life sentences after a third felony, while mandatory minimums removed judges’ authority over sentencing. Pell Grants — federal money that let prisoners earn college degrees — were eliminated for incarcerated people, and $9.7 billion funded new prison construction. This produced 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 rested on subprime lending—high-risk mortgages whose rising interest rates outstripped what borrowers could manage. The 2008 financial crisis brought those loans down, erasing the wealth they had created.

The lowest Safety score of any modern president stands at 1, reflecting the documented catastrophe of mass incarceration that the Crime Bill produced. How large that harm was and how long it lasted accounts for the Zero score of 9 — the highest penalty in the modern era.

The final push for Reconstruction-era Black voting rights came through Benjamin Harrison. The Lodge Bill would have stationed federal monitors at polling stations across the South. It took direct aim at poll taxes—fees you had to pay before voting—designed to keep poor Black citizens from the ballot box—along with literacy tests and the violence used to strip 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, prioritizing tariff legislation instead. The failure of the Lodge Bill marked the effective end of federal protection for Black voting rights for 75 years, and the next serious federal voting rights law would not come until 1965.

Theodore Roosevelt’s record turns on one dinner and the injustice that came with it. Hosting Booker T. Washington at the White House stood as a symbolic act carrying real political consequences — the Southern press attacked Roosevelt, and he never repeated the invitation.

The Brownsville Affair amounted to collective racial punishment targeting decorated Black soldiers who had served their country. Without evidence, trial or appeal, Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 men (Weaver, The Brownsville Raid, 1970; Senate Military Affairs Committee records, 1906–1908).

Not until 1972 — sixty-six years later — did the Army reverse those discharges. 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.

Under Calvin Coolidge economic prosperity largely bypassed Black Americans, even as the Roaring Twenties built wealth in white communities. During the Great Migration millions of Black Americans left the rural South for Northern cities, where they faced housing discrimination, job barriers, and racial violence.

Coolidge took no action on any of these fronts. Through the Immigration Act of 1924, racial hierarchy entered federal law by ranking immigrants according to national origin and favoring white Europeans over 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.

After Garfield’s assassination Chester Arthur inherited the presidency and produced a modest record. The Chinese Exclusion Act set a federal precedent, allowing racial identity to serve as the legal basis for keeping people out of the United States. 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 at a time when most politicians would not even mention the subject. In 1921 he delivered a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, that called for Black political and economic equality — a remarkable statement in the heart of the Jim Crow South.

Yet words never turned into action. Passing the House in January 1922 by 230–119 (H.R. 13, 67th Congress), the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill later died in the Senate to a filibuster — endless talk meant to block any vote.

Harding refused to spend political capital saving it. The same pattern runs through his record — a president who saw the crisis facing Black Americans yet decided against action after saying the right things.

Epidemic levels of racial terror lynching marked the South throughout William McKinley’s presidency, when an average of 100 Black Americans were lynched every year (Tuskegee Institute, Lynching Records, 1882–1968). Black leaders directly asked him to use federal power to stop the killing.

He refused. Although the framework awards credit for preserving some Black Republican patronage appointments and for the heroism of Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War, neither offsets his deliberate decision to let the extrajudicial murder of Black Americans continue without a federal response.

Franklin Roosevelt’s 24th-place ranking challenges the popular narrative that most people hold of the New Deal as an engine of progress. The program was never designed for Black Americans but instead to exclude them.

The Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers—job categories covering 65% of the Black workforce—so most Black workers received neither retirement nor survivor benefits. Although the Wagner Act granted workers the right to unionize, it still permitted unions to bar Black members. The FHA outlined Black neighborhoods in red on its lending maps and marked them too risky for loans, a practice that entrenched housing segregation and shaped American cities for the next century.

Executive Order 8802 stands as the honest counterweight, marking the first time the federal government banned racial discrimination in employment. Roosevelt signed it only under threat of a massive protest march organized by A. Philip Randolph.

Reactive rather than proactive, the order saw only limited enforcement. Roosevelt also refused to support anti-lynching legislation, telling NAACP leader Walter White directly 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.

Running a “Southern Strategy” sixty years before Nixon, William Howard Taft cut Black appointments and courted white Southern voters by showing he was willing to abandon Black Republican supporters.

Removing Black federal officials carried practical consequences. Those officials had stood as visible proof of the federal government’s commitment to racial equality, so their removal sent Southern states a clear signal that the federal government would not challenge the Jim Crow order.

Taft produced no significant positive action for Black Americans during his single term.

Inheriting the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover responded with policies that systematically excluded Black workers from relief. Federal work programs, run by state and local officials, saw jobs and resources directed first to white applicants.

During the Depression Black unemployment 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). This doubled the white rate, leaving half of Black workers in some cities with no job and no income.

Hoover’s administration took no action to ensure fair distribution of federal relief, and 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.

Choosing not to own slaves does not match fighting slavery through policy. Adams signed no legislation limiting slavery. During his term he proposed no restrictions on the slave trade, nor did he take any executive action to advance emancipation.

His presidency demonstrated that personal morality without political action produces zero measurable change.

John Quincy Adams emerged as one of history’s most passionate anti-slavery voices only after he left the presidency. During his four years in office he took no action against slavery, nor did he propose legislation or issue 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—came as 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 and gave Hayes the White House while Black Americans lost federal protection.

Once troops no longer enforced their rights, four million Black Americans were left defenseless. Ninety years of systematic disenfranchisement followed, together with economic exploitation and racial terrorism. Frederick Douglass’s appointment cannot compensate for the abandonment of four million people.

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

Though Zachary Taylor owned over 100 enslaved people, he resisted extending slavery into new territories. Strategy, not conviction, shaped his position. Had he survived, that resistance to the Compromise of 1850 would have prevented passage of the Fugitive Slave Act — the statute compelling free-state residents to aid in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Death claimed Taylor in July 1850, removing the threat of veto and allowing Millard Fillmore to sign the measure in his place.

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, yet he owned more than 600 of them. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves stood as a meaningful policy action — it shut down the pipeline of kidnapped Africans being brought to the United States.

For the millions already enslaved, however, it accomplished nothing. 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.

Jefferson helped design the three-fifths compromise — a rule that counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for political representation. The arrangement gave slave states more seats in Congress without extending rights to enslaved people. Political power thereby flowed to slaveholders 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 while expanding it in the other. Drawing a geographical line across the country, the Missouri Compromise barred slavery north of it—yet explicitly authorized its spread to the south.

Monroe owned 75 enslaved people and backed colonization, the plan to send free Black Americans to Liberia—a country named after him—rather than grant them equal rights at home. Though framed as charity, the movement was meant to remove free Black Americans from the United States instead of including them.

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

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

Often called the father of the country, George Washington oversaw 317 enslaved people at his Mount Vernon estate—123 owned by him personally, the rest dower slaves from Martha’s first husband’s estate. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 barred American ships from carrying enslaved people to foreign nations—a modest limit on the trade from which Washington himself profited.

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, establishing the stark principle that 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 through his will — yet solely after his wife’s death, never in his own lifetime. The framework scores presidential policy, not posthumous gestures.

James Madison created the constitutional mechanism that converted enslaved Black Americans into political power for their enslavers. The three-fifths compromise—a rule that counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for political representation—did not extend recognition to Black humanity at three-fifths. It weaponized Black existence instead.

Slave states gained additional seats in Congress for every enslaved person, though the enslaved themselves received zero rights. 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. The constitutional infrastructure he built actively harmed Black Americans for generations.

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

The Amistad case offers modest offset. His administration initially supported the kidnapped Africans’ claims to freedom, yet Van Buren later tried to send them back to avoid a diplomatic fight with Spain. The pattern stands out clearly: humanitarian principles were 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 went beyond merely allowing slaveholders to recover escaped enslaved people. Northern citizens now had to 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). Those payments established a direct financial incentive to rule against freedom, rigging the system by design.

This law made the entire United States complicit in slavery and eliminated the safety that free states had previously offered to escaped enslaved people. The Zero score of 9 reflects the magnitude of this legislation.

Only Woodrow Wilson among the presidents in this ranking 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 — restoring racial separation in federal offices integrated for decades. Black federal employees who had worked alongside white colleagues were moved to separate offices, given separate facilities, and fired in many cases.

Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House, lending presidential endorsement to its depiction of Black Americans as violent predators and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of white civilization. Within two years the Klan—which Grant had destroyed in the 1870s—had re-emerged as a mass movement that reached an estimated 4 million members by 1924 (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, who owned slaves, used the presidency to expand slavery. Annexing 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.

Waging a war of territorial expansion, James K. Polk 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 bought and sold enslaved people while serving as president and as a slave owner. Using the power of the office, he expanded 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 and personally profited from the slave trade. Signing the Indian Removal Act of 1830 — which forcibly relocated Native Americans from their land — he created a legal template that would later be used to justify removing other non-white communities.

The Indian Removal Act earns its score here for two reasons: the direct harm to Native Americans and the precedent it set for the federal government to 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 vote on whether to permit slavery—a formula known as “popular sovereignty.” Rather than producing a peaceful vote, the measure led to Bleeding Kansas, with open warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers that edged the country toward civil war.

Enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act with particular aggression, Pierce 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.

Tied for last place, Andrew Johnson worked harder than any other president to keep the end of slavery from producing 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 while pardoning 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, enabling the same men who waged war to preserve slavery to reclaim 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 stated that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Privately he lobbied justices to support the ruling, while the 1857 decision left Black Americans, whether enslaved or free, with no standing in federal court and no protection under the Constitution.

After enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, Buchanan 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.