African Americans

Did Arlington National Cemetery remove Gen. Colin Powell's profile from the cemetery's website in March 2025? A spokesperson for the cemetery told Lead Stories that the cemetery had removed a category relating to African-American service members, but that Powell's profile had been moved to two different sections of the website. Lead Stories confirmed Powell was still present in the sections…

Does a military document prove the U.S. Agency for International Development is "actively helping to destabilize nations"? No, that's not true: The 2021 document presented by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna at a hearing on February 13, 2025, was a scenario involving a fictitious country. Testifying at the same hearing, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios said the suggestion the agency was…

Was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a convicted felon? No, that's not true: King was indicted for a felony, tax evasion, in 1960, but the jury found him not guilty, the historical record shows. He was never convicted of a felony. King, who spent decades advocating for civil rights for Black Americans, was arrested multiple times for acts of various…

Did President Joe Biden call NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg an "intellectual wigger" at the NATO summit in Washington in July 2024? No, that's not true: Listening to recordings confirms the official transcript of the president's remarks at the summit, in which Biden said "intellectual rigor," not "intellectual wigger." No credible evidence or verified report supports this claim. The claim appeared…

Does a video on social media prove that the United Nations "is setting up shop" in the United States in 2023 to plot for a "take over" scheduled to take place "when WW3 is declared"? No, that's not true: This years-old claim was refuted by a U.S. State Department representative in 2016. He said that the U.N. vehicles seen in…

Did President Joe Biden describe African-American and Hispanic workers and veterans as "workers without high school diplomas"? No, that's not true: He was talking about unemployment rates for different groups of people. "Workers without high school diplomas" was one of the categories. The phase was not referring to African-American and Hispanic workers. The claim appeared in a post (archived here)…

Did today's Black Americans descend from Africans who inhabited North America before European colonizers arrived in the 15th century? No, that's not true: Paleontological, archaeological and genetic evidence all suggest that the original inhabitants of North America who were present on the continent when European explorers arrived were the ancestors of modern Indigenous people, an anthropologist told Lead Stories. Historical…

Does the idea that 1.4 percent of Americans owned slaves in 1860 represent the true extent of slavery at that time? No, that's not true: That statistic isn't meaningful. By 1860, slave ownership was concentrated in the southern U.S., making only the population in those states relevant to the issue of slave ownership. The population of the southern U.S. also…

Did the expression "woke" originate from the phrase "willingly overlooking known evil"? No, that's not true: The term "stay woke" was first used in a 1938 song by blues musician Lead Belly about Black teenagers accused of raping white women, according to a linguistics professor. Usage of the expression "woke" to indicate awareness of injustices dates to the Black labor…

Are Black Americans descended from the original indigenous inhabitants of North America and not from enslaved persons taken from Africa? No, that's not true: This notion descends from the Moorish Science Temple, a pseudoscience organization that argues without evidence that Black people are of "Moorish" descent and the original indigenous group of North America. Black Americans are descendants of enslaved…