Bill Clinton on being called 'first Black president': 'I took it as a great compliment'

Former President Clinton said he was flattered when acclaimed author Toni Morrison called him America’s "first Black president."

“When my friend Toni Morrison said that, you know, it was about — it was halfway serious and halfway making fun of me,” Clinton said at an event promoting his new memoir on Thursday.  

“But I took it as a great compliment. It wasn't that I owe it to my ancestors because I grew up in a white, southern, working-class family where my grandfather owned a country store and all of his customers were Black, and he loved them and they loved him.”

In 1998, Morrison wrote an essay for The New Yorker in which she called Clinton the nation’s "first Black president."

“After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote. 

“And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?”

But in 2008, Morrison said she never meant for the remarks to be flattering. 

“People misunderstood the phrase,” she said in an interview with Time. “I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”

But that hasn’t stopped some from embracing Morrison’s original characterization of Clinton. 

In 2016, at a campaign stop during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's White House bid, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced the former president as a “stand-in for the first Black president.”

Bill Clinton responded by saying everyone is “mixed-race.” 

“We learned that unless your ancestors, every one of you, are 100 percent, 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa, we are all mixed-race people,” he said. 

That same year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) jokingly referred to Bill Clinton as the first Black president in an interview with Spike Lee.  

“First Black president right? Obama is only the second Black president,” said Sanders. 

Former President Obama remains the nation’s only Black president.