Month: September 2019

The New York Times Magazine

August 18, 2019

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

_________________

The 1619 Project

From the front cover

A MUST READ !

HISTORIAN

EXCERPTS FROM SOME OF THE THOUSANDS OF COMMENTS AND LETTERS ON THE WORK OF J. A. ROGERS

Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois: “No man living has revealed so many important facts about the Negro as Rogers.”

In the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1949, No. 25, in the printed Brief Amicus Curiae on behalf of the Civil Rights Committee of the National Bar Association, which dealt with jim-crow seating on the dining cars and which ended in victory, his “Sex and Race” was cited as an authority that the color-line in America had no scientific foundation. More than a page of the brief was devoted to supporting quotations from “Sex and Race.” (pp. 18-19.)

H. L. Mencken , world -famed author, and dean of American letters: “Immensely entertaining and even more instructive. There is something new on almost every page, and you present it with the utmost effectiveness … a very competent job.”

Carl Murphy, editor, Baltimore Afro-American: “As enthusiastic as a sixteen-year old is J.A. Rogers … His Sex and Race, was so hot he had to print it himself … Rogers is an authority on mixed families and backs it up with years of study in the libraries of Europe and America.

“I read Sex and Race several times a year, for, until he came along, I never knew that such world figures as Hannibal, Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, Gustavus IV of Sweden, Robert Browning (the poet), the wife of Garibaldi (the Italian patriot), and Disraeli (English Prime Minister) if they lived in America could be jim-crowed, because of their colored ancestors.

“Nowhere else in contemporary literature is told the story of the Black Virgin Marys worshipped in many shrines in Europe.

“I’m waiting for Rogers’ new book … He has infected me with his enthusiasm.”

Prime Minister Nnamdi Azikiwe of Eastern Nigeria: “You are among those who inspired me to take a very keen interest in the study of the African in history.”

Rose Wilder Lane, noted author, “Who’s Who in America,” says of “World’s Great Men of Color”: An omnivorous reader such as I am, has a habit of classifying books. Dismissing the quantities of trash of all categories, there remain the entertaining books, the currently informative books, some books of more permanent worth, a few indispensable ones, and rarely a new one that tentatively may be called great.

“Now here is a book of such magnitude that it overlaps all these categories and goes into none. For three months I have been reading it with unflagging interest, with delight, amusement, excitement, profit, admiration and increasing dismay, for I must tell you about this book and I don’t think I can.

“I have thought of comparing it to Plutarch’s Lives, but then it more nearly resembles the History of the Father of History; yet it is American and contemporary, too…

“The author of the book is as difficult to classify as his work. Mr. J.A. Rogers is an American and a self-made scholar. He is an historian of enormous erudition. He is an anthropologist of no small caliber, elected in 1930 to membership in the Paris Society of Anthropologist. He has lectured at the Sorbonne and other leading European universities. He is a linguist, a world traveler, a journalist, an author, and, I would judge from references in his writings, a connoisseur of antique art. This book is a product of more than thirty years research in the world’s libraries and museums, and of experience in many countries …

“I know no easier, more fascinating way to begin to acquire the world view, innocent of propaganda or bias, based on fact, which no American learns from schools or the daily press, than reading World’s Great Men of Color.” From the Economic Council Review of Books, June 1947.

Rev. George S. Singleton, Editor, Christian Recorder, Philadelphia, Pa.: ” I have read with avidity and profound interest your fascinating and scientific treatise, Sex and Race … You have made civilization and culture debtor to yourself. I can all the more appreciate what you have done because some years ago I taught anthropology and Negro history.”

Louis A. Potter: “As a teacher in the Philadelphia schools I realize fully how great a need your contribution will fill. Not only in Philadelphia but throughout the world in general we suffer from an abysmal lack of inspirational knowledge of our own. You bridge that gap in a grand manner.

“May I commend you for the effortless style that enables one to fairly flow through the book, making it possible thereby to devote one’s entire attention to the absorption of the mass of material without the necessity of constant interpretation.

” Wishing you great success in your tremendous effort…May it be the dawn of an ever increasing wave of knowledge that must necessarily cause every Negro to hold his head a bit higher and all others who read your book to view the Negro with a loftier perspective.”

Marcus Garvey’s Negro World “From Superman to Man” is the greatest book on the Negro we have ever read. It gives the young Negro the historical authority that his race founded great civilizations, has ruled over areas as large as all Europe and was prolific in statesmen, scientists, poets, conquerors, religious and political leaders, arts, crafts, industry and commerce when the white race was wallowing in barbarity or sunk in savagery and cannibalism. ‘From Superman to Man’ was recommended for reading in the original Constitution and By-Laws of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.”

Miss Z. Baber, Instructor, University of Chicago: “‘From Superman to Man is the best literature I have read on the subject. I am placing it on the required reading list for my classes.”

THE AUTHOR

J. A. Rogers has engaged continuously in research on race relations since 1915. Published himself his first book, “From Superman to Man” in 1917 after it was refused by the publishers.

Wrote and published his second book, “As Nature Leads”, in 1919.

Began writing for the Negro Press in 1920 and has been doing so since.

In 1924, ’25, and ’26 toured the North and South lecturing and selling “From Superman to Man” (4th Edition).

In 1925 went to Europe for research in the libraries and museums there.

In 1927 returned for research lasting three years. Went to North Africa.

In 1930 went on his own initiative to the coronation of Haile Selassie, who presented him with the Coronation Medal. The same year published his “World’s Greatest Men of African Descent.”

From 1930 to 1933 continued his researches in Europe.

In 1934 published his “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro” which went into 19 editions.

In 1930, 1935 and ’36 continued his researches in Egypt and the Sudan.

In 1935 published his “Real Facts About Ethiopia” and went the same year as war correspondent to Ethiopia for the Pittsburgh-Courier.

In 1940 began publication of his “Sex and Race” in three volumes.

In 1947 published his “World’s Great Men of Color, 3000 B.C. to 1946 A.D. in two volumes.

In 1950 returned to Europe for further research on his “Nature Knows No Color-Line,” an exposition of the Negro ancestry in the white race, which he published in 1952.

In 1956 and ’57 studied black-white relations in England, Germany and other European countries with American troops.

Also author of several pamphlets, among them The Ku Klux Spirit, and the Real Facts about Ethiopia.

All books have been published by the author.

In 1930 was elected to membership in the Paris Society of Anthropology. Is now member of the American Geographical Society; the Academy of Political Science; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the Association Populaire des Amis Des Musees of France.

World’s Great Mean of Color.

BOOKS BY J.A. ROGERS

• Africa’s Gift to America
• World’s Great Men of Color, Vols. I and II
• Sex and Race, Vol I: The Old World
• Sex and Race, Vol. II: The New World
• Sex and Race, Vol. III: Why White and Black Mate in Spite of Laws and Social Opposition
• From Superman to Man
• 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
• Nature Knows No Color Line
• Five Negro Presidents

From the book jacket of the Civil War Centennial Edition of “Africa’s Gift to America“

HOW the North

PROMOTED, PROLONGED,

and PROFITED from

SLAVERY

Despite the presence of enslaved people throughout the North during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, their status as slaves has been largely erased. The words “slavery in the North” evoke ardent white abolitionists helping blacks to freedom along the Underground Railroad or gallant Union soldiers fighting for the emancipation of America’s enslaved.

But there were, in fact, thousands of captive people in New England, living and dying in slavery … a system that was cruel everywhere it existed, whether in Mississippi or Massachusetts.

__from Complicity

Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North’s profit from–indeed, dependence on–slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret … until now. In this startling and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.

Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory–and run in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line–including Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, the only slave trader ever sentenced to die in the United States, who even as an inmate of New York’s infamous Tombs prison was supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of “race science,” which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born black people.

Culled from long-ignored documents and reports–and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings–Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past. Expanded from the celebrated Hartford Courant special report that the Connecticut Department of Education sent to every middle school and high school in the state (the original work is required reading in many college classrooms), this new book is sure to become a must-read reference everywhere.

ANNE FARROW, JOEL LANG, and JENNIFER FRANK are veteran journalists for the Hartford Courant, the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication. Farrow and Lang were the lead writers and Frank was the editor of the special slavery issue published by Northeast, the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.

From the book jacket