Kamala Harris is a Descendant of a ‘Notorious’ Irish Slave Owner on Sugar Plantations in Jamaica

“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).

Brown migrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, where he became a passionate slave owner on the sugar plantations that formed the backbone of the island’s economy.

He resisted the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1832 and even traveled back to Antrim to replace his slaves with workers from his native county

Kamala Harris’s father, acknowledged their lineage to Hamilton Brown, Kamala’s slave-owning great-great-great-great grandfather, in an article titled “Reflections of a Jamaican Father.” He wrote:

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).”

Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken said today that Brown was a ‘notorious’ slaver and ‘not nice fellow’ who was born in Antrim but later settled in Jamaica.

‘He had numerous slaves, in fact Hamilton Brown routinely travelled back and forth to London to protest the abolishment of slavery.

‘He would come back to Ireland to take migrants back to Jamaica to work once slavery was abolished. A quote refers to him as “making slaves of migrants” in Ireland.’