African Americans

Did the NAACP officially endorse Donald Trump for the 2020 presidential election? No, that's not true: The NAACP never issued such a statement. It was published by a liberal satire website that tries to mislead Trump supporters into sharing made up stories that are clearly marked as satire when you click them. Foreign-run fake news websites frequently copy articles from…

Are African-American women inmates in Caifornia prisons sterilized to cut welfare costs in California? No, that's not true: The claim is a distortion of an investigative report that documented how some doctors at two state prisons bypassed approval procedures to perform sterilizations on 148 women -- including White, Asian, Hispanic and Black -- between 2006 and 2010. Surgeons failed to…

Does new DNA prove that African Americans are indigenous aborigines of America? No, that's not true: The claim that 98 percent of Black Americans are actually "Native Indians" is made in a series of articles and videos that lack documentation and misrepresent scholarly research to rewrite history. The self-described historian making the claim also purports that American slaves were not…

Did the U.S. Supreme Court grant a black man named Abraham Brown "40 acres of land and a mule" to fullfull a promise made by General William Tecumseh Sherman in a special field order during the U.S. Civil War? No, that's not true: the story was made up by a Canadian entertainment website that makes a living by publishing fictional…

Is Kamala Harris not an American Black considering that her parents are Indian and Jamaican and was she lying when she said she was part of the second class to be integrated at her elementary school? No, neither is true: While racial definitions in the United States are controversial, the federal government's definition of "Black or African American" includes persons…

Did Michael Jordan say he won't release another shoe until black people unite? No, that's not true: an old story from 2016 went viral again in 2019 (despite having been debunked in 2016 already) and despite the fact that Michael Jordan has released many, many new sneakers since then. The story that went viral again was an article (archived here)…

Were Malia And Sasha loaned to Barack and Michelle Obama by their real parents? No, That's not true: This is a conspiracy theory based on a purported resemblance of the Obama daughters to longtime friends of the family, a purported lack of baby photos of the girls, and the allegation that Michelle Obama is a transgender male unable to have…

Did Barack Obama's birth certificate use modern names for African-Americans, Kenya, and the birth hospital instead of the names used when the former U.S. president was born in 1961? No, that's not true: Contrary to a letter circulating for years on social media raising questions about the the legitimacy of the long-form birth certificate released by the White House in…

Did Thomas Jefferson own a copy of the Quran (or Koran) to better know his enemy, as he "led the charge" in a United States' war on Islam? No, that's not true: Jefferson obtained his copy of Islam's Quran as a law student in 1765, which was 20 years before he began addressing the problem of North African Muslim raids…

Did singer and actress Lena Horne, who broke barriers for African-Americans in film and television, recently die? No, that's not true: The legendary entertainer died on May 9, 2010 at the age of 92, but many social media users apparently mistook posts on the 9th anniversary of her as a new death announcement and shared it with new messages of…