Back in Time Today
History books often paint famous figures as heroes while glossing over their darker sides. Many people we celebrate actually left behind legacies filled with cruelty, racism, and violence. Learning about these complicated truths helps us understand history more honestly and reminds us that even celebrated individuals were deeply flawed humans.
1. Christopher Columbus (1451–1506)
Behind the elementary school lessons about the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria lies a man who unleashed horror upon the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Columbus didn’t just ‘discover’ new lands – he enslaved the Taíno people he encountered, forcing them to mine gold under threat of dismemberment. His governorship was so cruel that even fellow Spaniards reported his brutality. When natives couldn’t meet impossible gold quotas, Columbus had their hands cut off. His actions directly led to the decimation of the Taíno population – from hundreds of thousands to just a few thousand within decades.
2. Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
The cigar-chomping British bulldog who stood against Hitler harbored deeply troubling views about race and empire. While celebrated for his wartime leadership, Churchill’s decisions contributed to the 1943 Bengal Famine that killed approximately three million Indians when he diverted food supplies away from the starving region. His racial attitudes were shockingly explicit. “I hate Indians,” he once declared. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Throughout Ireland and the Middle East, Churchill advocated using poisonous gas against rebellious populations and authorized brutal colonial crackdowns that targeted civilians.
3. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
The elegant mind that penned “all men are created equal” owned over 600 enslaved people throughout his lifetime. Jefferson’s Monticello plantation operated through forced labor, and he rarely freed any of his enslaved workers despite his rhetorical opposition to slavery. Perhaps most disturbing was his relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman he owned who was just 14 when Jefferson began a sexual relationship with her. DNA evidence confirms he fathered at least six of her children. Jefferson also supported policies that systematically displaced Native Americans from their ancestral lands.
4. Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)
The frail man in wire-rimmed glasses who led India to independence through nonviolent resistance held some surprisingly troubling views. During his early years in South Africa, Gandhi wrote that Black Africans were “savages” and “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” His personal behavior included disturbing “purity tests” where he slept naked with young women, including his grandniece, to test his celibacy vows. Gandhi also advised Jews facing Nazi persecution to practice nonviolent resistance, suggesting they should willingly accept death to “bring the world and Hitler to their senses.”
5. King Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909)
While European monarchs scrambled for African colonies, Leopold created something uniquely horrific: a personal fiefdom disguised as a humanitarian venture. His privately-owned “Congo Free State” operated as a massive forced labor camp where Congolese were tortured, mutilated, and killed if they failed to meet rubber collection quotas. Leopold’s agents routinely cut off hands – even from children – as punishment or proof of bullets used. His brutal regime killed an estimated 10 million Congolese people through murder, starvation, disease, and exhaustion. All this horror funded Leopold’s lavish palaces and public works in Belgium while he never once visited Congo.
6. Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
The face on the twenty-dollar bill orchestrated one of America’s most shameful chapters. Jackson signed and enforced the Indian Removal Act, forcibly relocating over 60,000 Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast to territories west of the Mississippi. The resulting Trail of Tears killed roughly 4,000 Cherokee alone through exposure, disease, and starvation. A wealthy plantation owner, Jackson personally owned around 150 enslaved people and offered bounties for escaped slaves. His administration also suppressed abolitionist literature, authorizing the burning of anti-slavery mail.
7. Henry Ford (1863–1947)
The assembly line pioneer who made automobiles accessible to ordinary Americans harbored virulent antisemitism that shocked even his contemporaries. Ford published and distributed “The International Jew,” a hateful series that spread antisemitic conspiracy theories to millions of Americans. His newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, regularly featured articles blaming Jews for everything from war to economic troubles. Ford’s antisemitic writings so impressed Adolf Hitler that the Nazi leader praised him in “Mein Kampf” and kept Ford’s portrait in his office. In 1938, Ford accepted Nazi Germany’s highest honor for foreigners – the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.
8. J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972)
The founding FBI Director who built America’s premier law enforcement agency routinely violated the very laws he was sworn to uphold. Hoover maintained secret files on political leaders, using illegally obtained information to blackmail presidents, congressmen, and civil rights leaders. His obsessive vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr. included bugging hotel rooms and sending King an anonymous letter encouraging him to commit suicide. Under COINTELPRO, Hoover authorized illegal break-ins, sabotage, and false propaganda against civil rights and anti-war groups. His FBI also systematically denied the existence of organized crime for decades while Hoover collected racing tips from mob bosses.
9. Mother Teresa (1910–1997)
The tiny nun in a blue-bordered white sari won worldwide admiration for serving India’s poorest, but former volunteers paint a disturbing picture of her missions. Her Calcutta hospices routinely reused hypodermic needles after rinsing them in cold water and denied patients pain medication despite having funds to provide proper care. Mother Teresa believed suffering brought people closer to Jesus, once telling a terminal patient, “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” While millions in donations poured in, patients lay on thin mats in deplorable conditions. She also accepted money from dictators like Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier and praised his brutal regime.
10. Che Guevara (1928–1967)
The bearded face adorning countless t-shirts belonged to a revolutionary who embraced execution as political policy. As Castro’s right-hand man after the Cuban Revolution, Guevara oversaw the La Cabaña prison where hundreds of Batista supporters were executed without fair trials. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Guevara wrote. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.” His writings reveal deeply homophobic attitudes – he sent gay men to labor camps for “re-education.” Despite his image as a freedom fighter, Guevara helped establish a repressive one-party state that crushed political dissent and free speech.