Getting It Right BELOW,ON THE LEFT,IS PHOTOGRAPH OF MAN NAMED JOHN HANSON, WHO IN 1847 became one of the first senators of Liberia. Several times in the past few months, I have received e-mails from readers passing along an article titled "Black, a Moor, John Hanson." The article contains the very image you see here and a short biography of another John Hanson, who on November 5,1781, was elected the first president of the Congress of the Confederacy under the Articles of Confederation, the precursor to our present Constitution. What the text doesn't tell is that that John Hanson was a white man of Swedish descent. He is shown on the right. It is no wonder that people might confuse one with the other. They have the same name, and information on both of them can be found at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Archives. Quick search on any of these organizations 'Web sites yields information on, and pictures of, both John Hansons. A hurried researcher might well marry the image of the one man to the biography of the other, producing the first black President of the United States. The first time I saw the article, I knew it couldn 't be true. No matter how African-Americans have been ignored in the past, something as important as a black man becoming the head of a fledgling United States would have made it into the history books. Moreover, the same person could hardly have been head of state in one country and then senator in another nearly 70 years later, and even if such a thing could have happened and been kept secret, why would white America, in 1781, have allowed a black man to head its government? Finally, no one could have made a daguerreotype of the first John Hanson because he died decades before photography was invented. This wasn't the first time I'd encountered crossed identities or patches of misinformation taking on lives of their own in black history. I've seen articles and letters claiming that Ludwig van Beethoven and Eleanor Roosevelt were black, and have had volatile discussions about the ancestry of Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba. Because the history of black people has so often been adulterated, hidden, or ignored,many of us are in- clined to believe anyone who claims to have discovered the "real story."We believe it and we pass it on, not realizing that in the process, we may be passing on fiction. And once that fiction is out there, it gets repeated so often that it becomes impossible to take back and thus works to discredit a great, complex,tragic, hopeful and always vibrant past. The most effective tool we have to battle this type of misinformation is history. So the next time you read something that seems so astonishing that you can't believe it's true, dig deeper. And in the meantime, celebrate the history-makers we do know about; our actual history is wonderful enough. On page 13 you will find the full story of the daguerreotypist Augustus Washington, who took the picture of the black John Hanson. And read about André Cailloux, the first black Civil War hero. Some of the first pioneers to head West were African-Americans, and their tale, engrossing and true, begins on page 41. Such people, such stories are undeniably -and irresistibly -real.Let 's claim them as our own.     AUDREY M. PETERSON