Presumptive Democratic nominee and US vice-president Kamala Harris has Irish roots but not in a way that she is likely to embrace.
Ms Harris is the daughter of Donald J Harris, who was born in Jamaica, and Shyamala Gopalan Harris from India.
Genealogical research carried out by Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken reveals Ms Harris’s four-times-paternal-great-grandfather Hamilton Brown was born in Co Antrim in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence.
Brown emigrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, and became an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy. He opposed the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1832 and went to Antrim to replace his slaves with workers from his native county.
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He gave his name to Brown’s Town in Jamaica and is buried in the interior of St Mark’s Anglican Church, which he built with his own money. Brown was pro-slavery and hated the British abolitionist William Wilberforce who brought in a Slave Registry Bill to stop the trading of slaves between different islands in the Caribbean. Brown called him “cloven footed” and a hypocrite.
Brown received almost €11 million in modern money in compensation from the British government for his slaves, according to records held by University College London (UCL).
Compensation was paid when the UK government banned slavery across the British Empire in 1833. The British spent €20 million (£17 billion or almost 40 per cent of annual government revenue at the time) on compensation.
Brown received £12,610 for his slaves who were emancipated. He spent much of the money recruiting hired labour from his native Co Antrim.
Ms Harris’s father, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, acknowledged his family’s slave-owning past in a piece for a Jamaican newspaper in 2018. Curiously, relatives on his mother’s side are called Finegan. President Joe Biden’s Irish ancestors are also called Finegan (Finnegan).
Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me).
“The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, landowner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or allspice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptised and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).”
The direct genealogical link between Ms Harris and Brown is not considered comprehensively proven. One article on the internet suggests that Kamala Harris’s great-great-great grandmother Mary Melvina may have married a different Hamilton Brown who was not related to the first one.
The memorial to Hamilton Brown reads: ‘Sacred to the memory of HAMILTON BROWN Esq. Native of the County Antrim, Ireland, who departed this life on the 18th Sept 1843 in the 68th year of his age. He was the FOUNDER OF THIS TOWN. Was 22 years one of the Representatives for this parish in the Honourable. House of Assembly. His name will long be cherished.’
US president Joe Biden withdrew from the election race at the weekend following weeks of Democratic Party acrimony and internal polls showing his support collapsing versus Republican rival Donald Trump. Ms Harris has since secured enough support from party delegates to become the presumed Democrat nominee for November’s vote.
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