Joel Augustus Rogers: Negro historian in history, time, and space.

To fully understand the history, life, and times of Joel Augustus Rogers and his contributions to anti-racist historiography is to grasp how African Americans, as a "racial class and caste", are prisoners of their social existence. This social existence is set within a class relationship that has a dialectic of oppression, driven by domination and resistance to that domination. And it is revolutionary resistance that liberates the dominated class. The social relationship of oppression has its material basis, and that basis has its ideological manifestation. Joel A. Rogers' (1883-1966) life spanned the period in which the material basis of white oppression was solidified between the shadow of slavery and the plantation, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In this period, white capital kept black labor under its heel while refining the powerful ideology of white superiority and black inferiority in mass media, science, literature, theatre, film, and academic scholarship.

In their attempt to reject this ideology, Rogers and other historians wrote in direct response to what I term the "white supremacist school" of American history that was dominating the academy at the turn of the 20th Century. Commenting on this particular school in his 1968 presidential address at the Organization of American Historians, Thomas Bailey stated, "False historical beliefs are so essential to our culture.... How different our national history would be if countless millions of our citizens had not been brought up to believe in the manifestly destined superiority ... of the white race."

At the same meeting the following year, Comer Vann Woodward argued that "American history, the white man's version, could profit from an infusion of soul." (2) Probably unknown to Bailey and Woodward, many years earlier, Joel A. Rogers and his research did infuse history with a pinch of soul and instill in countless Americans an anti-racist version of historical events. Still, Bailey's and Woodward's comments did reference the suffocating social existence of white oppression, both material and ideological, that led Rogers to develop a social consciousness of resistance and prompted him to interpret African American history in an anti-racist manner, and with an "African-centered" paradigm. Rogers' approach, in its essence, placed individuals of African ancestry and blood at the center of the dialectics of history. It was premised on the notion that whenever change took place in history, whenever momentous events occurred, and whenever history had its "Waterloo," Black people were there acting, reacting, and most importantly, creating the historical moments and events that future historians would term "turning points" in the rise of civilization.

Joel Augustus Rogers was, as were his contemporaries, a man of his times. Like all humans, Rogers was a product of his social existence. This reality led him to a social consciousness peculiar to the historically specific social relationships in which he, as a result of his social class and "racial category," had lived and struggled. White versus Black was the social relationship that produced a disparity in social existence and, therefore, social and political thinking within each racial category. Historiography, as a mold of social thinking, developed its own dialectics of historical interpretation within the social relationship of American capitalist political economy. (3) Slavery, peonage, sharecropping, and Jim Crow produced a historical mindset within an antagonistic polarity between White and Black America. The historically defined social relationship that Joel Augustus Rogers struggled within was characterized by Rayford Logan's term "The Nadir." (4) This lowest point in African American history was indelibly stamped by what Allen Trelease termed "White Terror." (5)

The racial and class relationship of "White over Black" was fundamental to the domination of the recently freed ex-slave population during the period of Reconstruction and its aftermath-and White Terror was the basis of this domination. This terror was one of murder, rape, labor exploitation, segregation, the denial of political power, and, in W. E. B. DuBois's words, the "propaganda of history." (6) Professional historians rationalized and justified this domination of White over Black by producing this propaganda. The southern African American community responded to this dehumanizing social existence via armed and unarmed resistance, accommodationism, intellectual argumentation, and an almost biblical migration from the American South to the mythic northern land of milk and honey. Except for migration, the northern black communities responded in comparable ways. The period of the Nadir occurred during the years that encompassed the period of Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized this White Terror in numerous cases, epitomized by the infamous and singular separate but equal decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. (7) It is important to note that Joel Augustus Rogers' first attempt at writing anti-racist history is set within this "Nadir." (8)

It was this historical context and political milieu that would challenge Joel Augustus Rogers once he arrived in the United States. He became just one of many West Indians who made his imprint on African American history. (9) Rogers was born in 1883 in Negril, Jamaica. Rogers and a number of siblings were raised, after their mother passed, by their schoolteacher father, Samuel John Rogers. As a young man, Joel A. Rogers arrived in the United States in 1906, became a naturalized citizen in 1917, and lived in Chicago before eventually settling in New York City. Rogers worked in a variety of jobs including as a professional in a brokerage firm, a Pullman porter, and a teacher; however, he eventually found his niche as a reporter and journalist. In this capacity, he began to focus on combating white supremacist propaganda history and reclaiming the heroic heritage of the African presence throughout world history. (10) White propaganda history sought to justify the domination of White over Black by claiming that Africans and their descendants were inferior and hadn't contributed to the growth of human civilization. (11)

In 1911, while living in Chicago, a close colleague exposed him to scholarship that revealed to Rogers the great men of color within the history of civilization. It was this exposure that prompted Joel A. Rogers to dedicate his entire life to reclaim Africa's gift to the world through his researches. He began to write about the gifts of Black folk in 1917. That year is significant because Rogers became a naturalized United States citizen and, therefore, a part of the struggle by blacks against white supremacy. Moreover, that year marked the publishing of his seminal anti-propaganda work, From Superman to Man. (12) By the 1930s and 1940s Rogers was writing history columns in the Pittsburgh Courier, Messenger, Crisis, Mercury and in the New York Amsterdam News. Highlights of this journalistic phase were witnessing the coronation of Emperor Haile Salasie in 1930 and covering the Italo-Ethiopia conflict in 1935 as the Pittsburgh Courier war correspondent. (13) This international experience led Rogers to rethink his own assumptions about race, for he noted, "But, fortunately for me, I have traveled and read considerably.... I observed that, except for differences due entirely to environment, my people were essentially the same as whites.... I have failed to find [any differences] after ... thirty years of rather careful observation." (14) Joel A. Rogers was recognized for his professional excellence and intellect throughout his career. Rogers belonged to the Paris Society for Anthropology, the American Geographical Society and the Academy of Political Science and was also multi-lingual with a mastery of German, Italian, French, and Spanish. (15) Rogers lectured constantly and wrote extensively up until his death in 1966.

In his writings, Joel Augustus Rogers helped create a critical historiography that began, as early as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to reject propagandist historians of the Nadir. (16) Often asked why he began his research in "Negro History," Rogers responded with these words: "... I think it really began in my early childhood when it was firmly impressed on me by the ruling classes that black people were inherently inferior and that their sole reason for being was to be servants to white people and the lighter-colored mulattoes." (17) J. A. Rogers was one of the earliest lay or "street scholars" who wrote to reject this ruling class ideology-writers who wrote anti-propaganda history without the aid of formal educational degrees or training from established academic programs and without monetary remuneration. Earl Thorpe referred to this group as "historians without portfolio." (18)

Rogers and other street scholars, as with earlier African American university trained scholars, sought to reject the sentiment of the propagandists whose work would be characterized by the pseudo-historical opinion of Columbia University's John W. Burgess. Burgess who stated that "a black skin means membership in a race of men who have never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, have never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind." (19) Furthermore, Constitutional historian Charles Warren, commenting on the Nadir Supreme Court decisions that legitimized Jim Crow in the dictum "separate but equal" said, "... these cases were most fortunate. They largely eliminated from national politics the Negro question ... and restored the confidence in the Southern states." (20)

Rogers' writings and the theme of placing black men and women at the torrents of civilization's history were intended to debunk the false view of black inferiority produced by racist, university-trained academicians and by those who created a mass media market for mass consumption. At the time that Rogers wrote, Social Darwinists' theory was used to support the idea of black inferiority so starkly and often maliciously portrayed in the movies of the new popular culture. (21) The hallmark of movie making with this theme was D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of A Nation which was based on Thomas Dixon's book, The Clansman. This film convincingly conveyed the idea that Reconstruction failed precisely because blacks were not the equals of whites and were not "civilized" enough to participate in the democratic process. Thomas Dixon's book and Griffith's film essentially parallel the themes of the newly developing "white supremacy school of historical interpretation" which was created by professionally trained university white scholars at the major research institutions in this country. (22) This school of thought was based on three historical and ideological points expressed by different writers and institutions before and immediately after the Civil War.

Before the war, southern propagandists argued that taking the "African savage" from the barbarities of Africa was a paternal noblesse oblige. This point was conveyed by the Richmond Inquirer in 1841 when the editor stated that "No such thing as a Negro government has ever existed in Africa." (23) The similarities between this often repeated popular assertion and the more deliberate pseudo-scholarly opinion of John W. Burgess, is striking. The second point widely disseminated by white supremacist scholars at the turn of the century was that the Radicals program attempts, to uplift the freed people, was a veiled attempt at the Africanization of the "white South," and therefore, placed Black over White. To Africanize the South meant placing the savage over the civilized. Scholars such as William Dunning, Woodrow Wilson, and the revered constitutional historian, Charles Warren, argued Africanization theory with great intellectual force.

In 1929, Claude Bowers' The Tragic Era summed up Reconstruction as a god-forsaken attempt to humiliate the civilized white South by putting it under the heels of a barbaric black South. And it was only through the triumph of the redemptive Ku Klux Klan that a modicum of civil society was reestablished. The third and last point propagated by white supremacist scholars was that the "American Negro" was morally, intellectually, and socially so inherently inferior that trying to "legally equalize black and white" would violate the first principles of the laws of nature. (24)

Joel A. Rogers' dialogues in his 1917 quasi-autobiographical book, From Superman to Man attacked the falsehoods of all three perspectives. An analysis of From Superman to Man reveals that Rogers understood clearly the need to combat the ideological attack on black folk by using his historical perspective and use his perspective on history to "win" the battle of disparate social consciousness between himself and at least one white supremacist southerner. The setting for the novel is on a train traveling between Kansas and California. A porter on the train has a series of "dialogues" or discussions with a racist southern senator on why "white" is dominating "black" as they speak. Rogers uses the voice of the porter, Dixon, to convey his own understanding of the falsehood of white history and the inhumanity of the terror of White over Black. In chapter one, we find Dixon reading Jean Finot's Race Prejudice that prompts Rogers as Dixon to reflect upon why he studies and writes anti-racist historiography. The quote is, "The doctrine of inequality is emphatically a science of white people. It is they who invented it." Dixon comments that this passage "recalled to him some of the many falsities current about his people ... all sorts of theories to prove his people were inferior." (25) Dixon becomes determined to reject the volumes of publications that support these falsehoods by doing his own research. When Dixon encounters the senator, he realizes that this is the man who he has overheard to say, "The nigger is a menace to our civilization and should be kept down," (26) and that "nature has placed an insuperable barrier between black and white that will ever prevent them from living on the same social plane." (27) Thus begins the dialogues that permit Rogers to comment on racism, segregation, race mixing, democracy, communism, religion, science, and so forth.

Using the fictitious senator and other passengers, Rogers conveys the correct historical understanding of racism's pervasiveness in any portion of America which lay south of the Canadian border. Attacking the first principle of the white supremacist school which refers to the absence of civilization in the hands of Africans, Dixon responds to the senator's assertion that "... while the white, red and yellow races have, or have had civilizations of their own, the black has had none." (28) In dialogical response, Dixon coldly states "... The belief that the history of the Negro began with his slavery in the New World, while popular, is highly erroneous. The black man ... was civilized when the dominant branches of the Caucasian variety were savages. You will remember sir, that Herodotus, the Father of History ... distinctly mentions the black skins, and wooly hair of the Egyptians of his day. In Book II, Chapter 104, of his history he says: 'I believe the Colchians are the color of Egyptians, because like them they have black skin and wooly hair." (29) Dixon then goes for the jugular and quotes Aristotle on the same subject as well as Count M. C. de Volney, author of The Ruins of Empire who stated "The ancient Egyptians were real Negroes of the same species as the other present natives of Africa." (30)

    In another dialogue, he has one "anti-Negro" southern passenger say
  to another northern passenger, You, too, had slavery in the North, but
  it didn't pay and you gave it up. Wasn't your pedantic and self-
  righteous Massachusetts the first to legalize slavery? You, too, have
  race riots, lynching and segregation. The only difference between
  South and North is, that one is frank and the other hypocritical, and
  he added with vehement sincerity, 'I hate hypocrisy.'" (31)

Certainly this conversation and political point conveys the sentiment of Malcolm X, who many years later would cleverly state, "... the South is anything south of the Canadian border." Conveying this analysis through the character of the southerner, Joel A. Rogers had become a 60ish neo-revisionist historian, who like C. Vann Woodward, clearly perceived that the strange career of Jim. Crow had northern origins. (32) Rogers hated hypocrisy and tried to demonstrate this antipathy in his writings. One of the essential themes of Rogers' writings is revealing the mendacious contradiction and hypocrisy of America and its racist historiography, for example, land of the tree, home of the grave versus the land of the free, home of the brave.

Using a class analysis, Rogers has Dixon describe British colonialism as a system of class, not race. Dixon explains to the senator that Indians, poor whites, and blacks were used as slaves to advance British mercantilist interests in the colonial period. Dixon tells the senator "The Negro was introduced, supplanting both the Indian and the white, as worker. A white slave was far more valuable than an Indian one, and a Negro more than either." (33) More importantly, is that Dixon gives the senator a source for his knowledge of history and it is Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Columbia University, vol. 54. (34) John G. Burgess was, at the time, a professor at Columbia University.

Commenting on white terror and lynching, the senator asks Dixon his opinion of the news headline, "Negro Burned by Mob of Cheering Texans, Thousands, including Young Girls, See Black Burned Alive at Stake In Public Square." An indignant and defiant Dixon responds with, "The conscience of the nation is numb, that is, if it ever had any conscience at all ... No, lynching isn't stopped ... because the majority of our law-makers and rulers for the past fifty years have been and are a part of that system of exploitation...." (35) Rogers then aimed, once again, his "autobiographical self" squarely at the false assertion within the writings of propagandist historians that Africans have never created any civilization. Rogers dialogues confront this assumption at various points in the novel. The senator rambles on about how "... the Negro race has never produced a Julius Caesar, a Shakespeare ..." (36) In response, Dixon mentions the Harvard researches of Dr. Reisner at Napata, which revealed the greatness of the Ethiopian civilization and King Tirkaqua, who was mentioned in the book of Isaiah. (37) Rogers, in using this citation, anticipated much of the debate by Biblical scholars today on the African presence in scripture.

The novel is replete with dialogues that reject the white supremacist school of thought. Rogers supports the Black is beautiful sentiment by mentioning that even Shakespeare commented on how "black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes." (38) However, Dixon knows that this sentiment is not held by all Negroes at that time. The senator firmly states that "... the Negro, himself, acknowledges his racial inferiority. Just look how he bleaches his skin, straightens his hair ... I can't imagine a more comical sight than a Negro dandy with his hair all ironed out until it looks like the quills upon the fretful porcupine." (39) Rogers understood that self-hatred was something that false history and racism created. The senator continues by noting how the word "nigger" is used first by the white man, but then the Negro takes it up and call each other by that epithet. (40) Dixon observes that a "... Negro who takes pride in his white descent simply does not think." (41) And in Africa, white skin is an ugly form of inversion. Dixon adds that, "The Yoruba word for white man is not complimentary. It means 'peeled man'". (42)

In this novel, Joel A. Rogers covered a wide array of "history" as conveyed by the propagandists. Ultimately, Dixon as Rogers responds to the senator's statement concerning the purity of white blood. This purity issue was one of the ideological driving forces of the Jim Crow system. The senator strongly states that, "no blood flows from the black race into the whites." (43) Dixon attacks by saying "Intermixing of black and white has been going steadily on for about three hundred years,... [and] no stratum [exists] of American society in which you will not find persons of mixed strain ... The American Anglo-Saxon ... has, too, a considerable percentable of Negro strain.... One of the whitest whites persons I have ever met is a 'colored woman'." (44) Of course, this piece of knowledge is based on Joel A. Rogers' three-volume study entitled Sex and Race. (45)

Finally, Rogers recognized the most effective way of conveying "professionalized" racist history to a mass public was on the celluloid of "the big screen" with the public, irrespective of race, class, and gender, gawking at striking stereotyped visual images of "toms, mammies, mulattoes, coons, and bucks. (46) The classic case in point was the film, Birth of A Nation. Dixon makes a direct comment on this film, although, Rogers in the novel, changed the names to protect the guilty referring to the film as "The Abortion of a Nation" and the writer as Thomas Vixen-a great play on words for both. Dixon states that Vixen is "... the most misleading of those who write against the Negro." (47) Noting that Vixen's writings have caused riots and lynching. Rogers was acutely aware of the import of these new film images, for he has his senatorial antagonist in his book 1917 From Superman to Man," once cleansed of his racist ignorance, uses his power as a film studio head to produce positive historical images of blacks on the silver screen. (48) The southern senator reflected "I have interests in a large motion picture concern ... and I have been thinking that in order to create a better understanding of the Negro, and as an offset to the caricature so often made of him, that I would get Negro actors for such plays as call forth the best expressions of the soul." (49)

While Rogers made his oppositional statement about Griffith's film, the members of the northern wing of the black bourgeoisie had already mobilized their opposition by both exhibiting, in their daily lives, "white civility" in their social clubs, dress, speech, and urbanity and creating political organizations that fought for honest images on the celluloid screen and equal treatment before the law. The Birth of A Nation was not shown in Boston and other cities, due to the organize opposition efforts of the recently formed NAACP, Monroe Trotter's Equal Rights League, and other activist groups. This new black political activism paralleled the activism of the black working class who combated the material basis of their labor exploitation. They organized as a class for itself through boycotting white businesses that didn't hire black workers, "buying black," and creating sharecropper unions that resisted "the shadow of slavery and the plantation." (50) Rogers was obviously aware of the widely reported and headline news of the 1917 incident in Elaine, Arkansas, where black sharecroppers organized a "fraternal order" to combat the shadow of slavery in the guise of peonage. Race war erupted in Elaine, eventually leading to multiple deaths on both sides and the U.S. Supreme Court interceding to bring the conflict to closure. (51) Race war continued, in 1917, with the almost total destruction of the black community in East St. Louis by white mobs, whereas Black soldiers of the Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry fought a pitched battle in Houston against whites determined to maintain Jim Crow oppression. Rogers and other black historians, especially street scholars, felt the tempo of these engagements and the rhetoric of white supremacy, which argued the use of any means to keep the "nigger in his place." Rogers' concern for the racial violence engulfing the country prompted him to write an open letter, "The Approaching Storm" which described what should be done to avoid total race war. (52) This publication clearly demonstrates that Rogers' literary efforts were driven by the history that he was confronting in the place and time that he lived. To understand Rogers is to understand this space and time in history.

Rogers and his contemporary "historians without portfolio" responded to the propaganda of history perpetuated by their white counterparts by writing historical interpretations which can be categorized in three major African American schools of thought; the Negro History School, the Black History School, and the Marxist History School. These schools existed simultaneously, and many scholars moved, with ease, from one to the other. Various African American historians such as Earl Thorpe, Vincent Harding, Sterling Stuckey, and John Hope Franklin have tried to periodize these schools. (53) The historians who created The Negro History School, in which Rogers should be placed, sought to combat the Nadir of exclusion and second-class citizenship by demonstrating that the Negro had as much right as the next person to be included in the American social, political, and economic fabric. They did this by writing history that revealed the "contributions" of the Negro to the growth of American civilization. Because of these contributions, the Negro had earned the right to feast at the "American dinner table" as equals. Contribution historical writing emphasized black heroes of the American saga whose feats were the equal of the traditional white luminaries in history. George Washington had his equal in Phyllis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson in Benjamin Banneker, Abraham Lincoln in Frederick Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt in Booker T. Washington, Davy Crocket in George Bonga, and so forth. Earning the right to equal inclusion by participating in a saga of immense destructiveness was the obvious contradiction in this approach to rejecting the propaganda of history.

In contrast, the Black History School writers tended to indict and criticize white Americans for their destruction and exploitation of people of African ancestry. This saga of destruction, they argued, should add up to some degree of "reparations" for the victims of this destructiveness, and Africans should be the second in line after the Native American Indian. (54) Finally, the Marxist History School of writing emphasized the class basis of black exploitation and how racism solidified class disparities. In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois attempted to define this third category. And C. L.R. James best clarified the dialectics of race and class when he noted that "The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. (55)

Coming shortly after DuBois's Black Reconstruction was Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts (56) which used James' observation as the basis of his analysis of slave resistance in the antebellum South. A materialist understanding of African American history and social condition attracted Joel Rogers and others including Hubert Harrison. (57) Having seen the importance of Marx and Engels' analysis of capitalism, Rogers joined "a radical economic group composed of whites and Negroes." (58) However, the members of the group ridiculed him when he mentioned that he was collecting names of great Negroes. Labeled a racial chauvinist, Rogers quickly left the group but interestingly, used a materialist analysis in his writing when examining sex and race. (59)

Joel A. Rogers was a "historian without portfolio" who mainly wrote from the "Negro History School" perspective. In his writings, Rogers emphasized the contributions of people of African ancestry to the development of world civilization developed. He was an idealist in the first and last instance. He assumed that material interests did not drive ideas and social consciousness and, therefore, he strongly believed that social change could come about by altering how people thought about the past and present. And it was this assumption that would permit him to write about how a die-hard white supremacist could change from thinking of himself as a white superman to merely the equal of a black man by being informed of the great contributions of Africa's Gifts to America" and the world. For Rogers, these contributions inspired the activism within the incipient civil rights movement occurring from Oklahoma City to Montgomery. This activism was combating the last death throes of Jim Crow.

The hypocrisy of democracy detente with Jim Crow exploded when the South massively resisted the desegregation decisions in the mid-1950s. This resistance was both material (Klan violence) and ideological. The Southern Manifesto of interposition and nullification and the plethora of white supremacist writings to justify the manifesto led Rogers to attack this hypocrisy and mendaciousness in an immediate written response. He described his 1961 work, Africa's Gifts to America as a response "to the revival of anti-Negro literature that followed the ruling of the United States Supreme Court against segregation in the public school system in 1954." This explicit statement and the response therein is consistent with an earlier 1920 title, The Approaching Storm, which, as stated previously, was written to critique the Chicago race riot, in particular but also other outbreaks of racial violence that occurred during the "Red Summer of 1919." This book was a public warning about race war and how it could be avoided.

In Africa's Gift to America, Rogers cited his numerous trips to Europe's libraries and archival institutions and to Egypt and the Sudan to examine the various documents, pictures and histories that would become the primary source citations for many of his claims. These travels took him to Europe as early as 1925, several times in the 1930s and several times after WWII, during the 1950s. This was Rogers' way of acquiring the academic credentials that would validate his research and provide the scholarly authority required for such public discourse. The difficulty of this research task was immense. Rogers once stated "... it was not easy since the story of the contacts of whites and blacks is usually told from the white angle." (60) And this ongoing research was being completed during the stressful period in which whites were determined to stop black militancy in the wake of the Brown v. Board decisions of the mid-1950s.

The "Southern Manifesto" was a document signed by every southern member of Congress that advocated, albeit indirectly, any means necessary to negate Brown v. Board of Education. Klan violence played itself out under this umbrella of congressional authority. (61) Violence against blacks by whites reflected the political economy of white supremacy, whether it was white master vs. black slave, or white boss v. black peasant, or white manager v. black worker. In Africa's Gifts to America, Rogers explained that the writing of history is a part of the persistence of resistance to white oppression, and the history written should reveal the falsity of white propaganda history. The two major themes in his refutational history were to document, in biographical form, the contributions of those with African ancestry to the rise and advance of civilization and to attack the falsehood of racism as it pertained to segregation and sexual prohibitions.

The various titles of his books and pamphlets confirmed the first theme: World's Greatest Men and Women of African Descen; World's Great Men of Color; World's Greatest Men of African Descent; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro; Five Negro Presidents; and The Real Facts About Ethiopia. In articles published in newspapers and journals, this theme was further established in: Freedomways, "Civil War Centennial, Myth and Reality;" in Crisis, "The Suppression of Negro Slavery," in The Messenger, "Is There a Psychological Gulf Between the Caucasian and the Negro?" and so forth.

Rogers' other major refutational theme was to address the falsity of the ideology of white racism, segregation, and its sexual paradigm that "race-mixing" violated the laws of nature. Much of the dialogue between the porter and the southern senator in From Superman to Man involved the senator's use of this paradigm to prove his superiority and the porter's use of the best research of science to refute and reveal this paradigm as false. Moreover, some of Rogers' most popular works are written with this theme in mind, such as Nature Knows No Color-Line, and Sex and Race published in three volumes. And Rogers states emphatically that race, as an idea, is fundamentally irrational and "To, talk, therefore, of a 'pure' race or a 'pure' ancestral line is abysmal ignorance." (62) This belief was the key to his quest to locate that "one drop" in great men and women in world history. To disprove the white race and therefore the rationale for domination, led Rogers to pen a chapter entitled "Negro Ancestry in the White America." (63) Revealing the falsity of race would lead to an honest dialogue on the insane idea of "races" and would change, in a progressive way, the mindset of racist whites.

By examining individuals, Rogers extols the virtues of biography in establishing bloodlines and how these individuals of African blood and their deeds were involved in the torrents of history. According to Rogers, using biography as history "To bring out the best in ourselves and at times the worst ... will ever be the highest and most civilizing form of literature." (64) The use of biography to inspire and develop historical consciousness was not peculiar to Rogers. He was aware of, and he was influenced by, the efforts of other issue oriented "intellectuals" such as David Bryant Fulton, W. Wesley Weeks, William Ernest Braxton, the materialist Richard B. Moore, the noted John Edward Bruce, and the incomparable Arthur Alphonso Schomburg. (65) These men, with the exception of Moore, organized in 1911 the Negro Society for Historical Research, which was soon followed, in 1915, by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The Harvard-trained historian, Dr. Carter Goodwin Woodson, founded this second organization. Biography, as the driving force of historical understanding and inspiration, was promoted by both lay and street scholars and by university trained historians. As early as 1910, John Edward Bruce published his Short Biographical Sketches of Eminent Negro Men and Women. This work examined the lives of Martin Delaney, Benjamin Banneker, Abraham Hannibal, Toussaint L'Ouveture, Prince Gaghanga Acua, Robert Brown Elliott. (66) Quite obviously, Rogers' many biographical works fall into this tradition. Rogers mentioned that it was his readings of great black individuals that helped him to focus more on biography.

The academic work of both lay and university-trained scholars paralleled the activism of black political leaders. Clearly, there was interactivity between the rise of black nationalism, blacks on the left, and Negro integrationism. John Edward Bruce became the editor of Marcus Garvey's Negro World, W.E.B. Du Bois became the editor of the NAACP's the Crisis and J.A. Rogers was a friend of Garvey and wrote essays in the Crisis magazine. All of these men were "New Negroes" who sought, in the words of Langston Hughes in his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," (67) to be unashamedly honest about the historical past, and in doing so, create a peace within oneself. This honesty was based on truth, fact, and not the opinions or sensitivity of whites, and Rogers' writings reflected this point. The porter Dixon assertion that all "... accusations must fall before fact," recognizes that empirical data and logic will be the driving forces of argumentation and refutation of white supremacist history. And in a strange twist, it is this idealism, this belief that ideas, and not revolutionary change in social existence, can change the social consciousness of a class and the concrete reality that supports that class, that defines Rogers as the arch typical idealist Negro historian. Rogers believed that an extensive face-to-face dialogue, with the presentation of fact in response to false accusations, will not only intellectually reject falsehoods but reverse the social consciousness of the individual that believes in and is espousing those falsehoods.

One of Rogers' favorite quotes came from Edmund Burke, who stated "A people will never look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." (68) However, he also believed that scientific and objective rendering of the past was crucial in the dialogue between blacks and whites. Persuading whites about the greatness of African blood and achievement, in a rational manner, would cleanse Whites of their racism and reestablish their humanity. Rogers would not accept the outrageous claims of certain proponents of "Negro History" today. In reference to those who assert these outrageous claims, Rogers said that, "In short, Negro history was only a rebuttal of this braggadocio of the white masters. (i.e. white supremacy historiography). Let me say here that I feel emphatically that any boasting by Negroes about their history is just as nauseating. Furthermore, those individuals who work themselves up to a state where they talk as if the deeds of an ancestor were actually done by themselves will probably go no further than that in doing something worthy themselves. One of the world's greatest needs has ever been unboastful, unbiased history. (69) Rogers was driven to write refutational historiography because of the "asininity" concocted by the "master race." (70) which was even implanted in religion.

Rogers vigorously objected to the "Curse of Ham" interpretation of scripture, which stated that black people "were cursed by God and doomed to eternal servitude to white people because Ham has laughed at his drunken father, Noah." (71) For Rogers, not "even at the risk of eternal torture" could he "swallow" this falsehood even though many Black preachers, as "tools of the master class," taught this sense of inferiority within Black churches. (72) After numerous experiences interacting with Blacks who accepted the Ham adage, he realized that these blacks not only suffered from this insanity but enjoyed it. (73) But it was his travels throughout the world that really opened his eyes to the false basis for this insanity. Rogers' travels revealed the class stratification in Europe that created immense poverty and ignorance far greater than what he saw in Africa. Moreover, in 1911, a close colleague in Chicago exposed him to scholarship that revealed to Rogers great men of color in civilization and coupled with his other experiences led him on his quest to reclaim Africa's gifts to the world through his researches.

Joel August Rogers' thinking was molded by history, time and space. He was not unlike most of his black contemporaries. They all wanted to change America for the better and probed here and there for an opening in which they could insert a surgical knife of historical truth and fact that would exorcise, and therefore, kill the cancer of racism within the body politic of the country. Rogers own gift to America was to inspire other street scholars and university-trained scholars of African ancestry to infuse history with some soul. Many activists of the 1960s carried Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of Quotations; however, for most black activists of the period their little book was J. A. Rogers' 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro. And it was the soulful history in this little pamphlet that would help mold the militant trajectory of the 1960s because Rogers' amazing facts about the Negro inspired the activists of the sixties to become the new heroes and heroines who helped create a non-Jim Crow America.

Endnotes

(1) Malik Simba is a member of the Department of History, California State University at Fresno.

(2) Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 206-249. See also Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, Collier Books, 1969) pp. 242-275, 371-392; A. Newby, Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930.

(3) Novick, p. 8.

(4) Logans' first title was The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901.

(5) Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1979). See also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Boston, Belford, 1997).

(6) W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, Atheneum, 1971) see chapter XVIL "The Propaganda of History," pp. 711-729.

(7) C.A. Lofgren, The Plessy case: A legal-historical interpretation (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987).

(8) Joel Augustus Rogers, From Superman to Man (New York, J. A. Rogers, 1917). See also William A. Preston, "Nietzsche on Black," in Louis Gordon, ed., Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York, Routledge, 1997). Even though Rogers doesn't directly mention Nietzche in the novel, the dialogues along the line of "the Superman" and racism indirectly offers a critique of Nietzche. There is warranted assertability with the assumption that Rogers understood the implications affixed to Nietzche's philosophy. For a direct critique see Preston's essay.

(9) See Wilfred D. Samuels, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917-1929 (Boulder, Belmont, 1977); Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early-Century American (New York, Verso, 1998); W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner, eds., Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem (Bloomington, Indiana University, 1988) see also John McClendon's analysis of the African Blood Brotherhood in this publication.

(10) See Darryl Pinckey's, "The Roots of History," extract from the Alain LeRoy Locke Lecture on Joel Augustus Rogers at Harvard University. You can review this and other lectures in his book Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (BasicCivitas Books, U.S.) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/O,12084,771827.00.html.

(11) J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (New York, Macmillan, 1972) preface entitled, "How and Why This Book Was Written."

(12) J.A. Rogers, From Superman to Man (New York, J.A. Rogers, 1917) and fifth edition (New York, Helga M. Rogers, 1957) W. Burghardt Turner located the other three editions. Second edition published in 1917 by Goodspeed Press, Chicago; J.A. Rogers, Chicago, 1924, and Lenox Publishing Company, 1941. see his footnote one in "J.A. Rogers: Portrait of An Afro-American Historian, Black Scholar, January-February, 1978, p. 38.

(13) Linda Ray Peters, "The Life and Works of Joel Augustus Rogers," unpublished M.A. thesis, Department of Inner City Studies-Northeastern Illinois University, 1978.

(14) J.A. Rogers, From Superman to Man, (New York, Helga A. Rogers, 1957) p. 23.

(15) Op. cit., Peters. 10.

(16) Earl Thorpe, Black Historian, A Critique (New York, William Morrow, 1959); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana, University of Illinois University Press, 1986), Ralph L. Crowder, John Edward Bruce (New York, NYU Press, 2004) see also John Hope Franklin "On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History" in Darlene Clark Hine, The State of Afro-American History (Baton Rouge, Louisiana University Press, 1986).

(17) Joel A. Rogers, World Great Men of Color, p. 1.

(18) Earl Thorpe, Black Historians, pp. 143-144.

(19) John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902) p. 133.

(20) Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in U.S. History (Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, 1922) volume 2, p. 608.

(21) Michael L. Blakely, "Scientific Racism and the Biological Concept of Race," Literature and Psychology (Spring-Summer 1999) pp. 29-54. See also George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York, Free Press 1968).

(22) William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865-1877 (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1907), Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, Columbia University Press, 1905), Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South (New York, Appleton and Company, 1912), James Ford Rhodes, The History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877-seven volumes (New York, MacMillan, 1904-1920), Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion (New York, Longsman, Green, 1910).

(23) William Loren Katz, Teacher's Guide to American Negro History (Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1971) p. 6.

(24) David E. Kyvig, "History as Present Politics: Claude Bowers' The Tragic Era, Indiana Magazine of History, 73 (1977) Another critique of the white supremacist school can be found in Robert Cruden, "James Ford Rhodes and the Negro: A Study in the Problem of Objectivity,: Ohio History, LXXI, no. 2, July 1962.

(25) Rogers, From Superman to Man, p. 8.

(26) Rogers, ibid. p. 9.

(27) Ibid. p. 9.

(28) Ibid. p. 18.

(29) Ibid. p. 18.

(30) Ibid. p. 18.

(31) Ibid. p. 10

(32) Comer Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, Oxford University Press, 1966).

(33) Rogers, From Superman to Man, p. 55

(34) Ibid. p. 56.

(35) ibid. p. 103

(36) Rogers, From Superman to Man, p. 18.

(37) Ibid. p. 20.

(38) Ibid., p. 88.

(39) Ibid. p. 25-26.

(40) Ibid., p. 27.

(41) Ibid., p. 30.

(42) Ibid. p. 31.

(43) Rogers, From Superman to Man, p. 85

(44) Ibid, p.85.

(45) ibid. p. 86

(46) Donald Bogle, Toms, Mammies, Mulattoes, Coons, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York, Continuum, 1990). See also Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1945 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993).

(47) Ibid, p. 121.

(48) Ibid. p. 129.

(49) Ibid p. 129.

(50) Pete Daniels, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1972).

(51) Moore v. Dempsey 261 U.S. 86 (1923)

(52) Joel A. Rogers, The Approaching Storm and How It May Be Averted (Chicago, Rogers Publishing Company, 1920) This pamphlet was published with the aid of the National Equal Rights League of America. See also Elliot Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2nd 1917(New York, Meridian Books, 1964).

(53) Negro History School: Benjamin Brawley, A Social History of the Negro (New York, MacMillan 1921), John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York, Knopf Publishers, 1947), Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in Our History (12th edition, Washington, D.C., Associated Publishers, 1972); Charles Wesly, "Propaganda and Historical Writing: The Emancipation of the Historian," Opportunity, volume 13 (August, 1935).Black History School: Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share The Story of the Movement (Maryknoll, Orbis Press, 1990), Lerone Bennett, Black Power, U.S.A., The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877 (Chicago, Johnson Publishing, 1967), Robert L. Harris, Teaching Afro-American History (Washington, D.C., American Historical Association, 1985) Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York, Collier Books, 1965) Boris Bittker, The Case for Black Reparations (Boston, Beacon Press, 2004).

(54) Boris Bittker, The Case for Black Reparations (New York, Random House, 1973).

(55) Marxist History School: Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (New York, Octagon Books, 1969), L.D. Reddick, "A New Interpretation for Negro History," The Journal of Negro History, volume 32, no. 1, January 1937, Abram Harris, "Reconstruction and the Negro, "The New Republic, volume 183, August 7, 1935, W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, (New York, Atheneum, 1962), Abram Harris, "Our Second Bourgeois Revolution," The Nation, volume 146, no. 1, January 1938, Doxey A. Wilkerson, Class Forces in the Development of Free Public Education in the United States (New York, Jefferson School of Social Science, 1955). see also-C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins (New York, Vintage Books, 1963) p. 283.

(56) Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, Columbia University Press, 1943).

(57) Jeffrey Perry, ed., A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

(58) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1972) p. 6.

(59) Rogers, From Superman to Man, pp. 28-30.

(60) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, p. 1.

(61) Charles W. Eagles, ed., The Civil Rights Movement In America (Jackson, University of Mississippi, 1986) p. 15

(62) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, 14

(63) Rogers, Nature Knows No Color-Line (New York, Helga M. Rogers, 1952) p. 189.

(64) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, p. 7.

(65) Ralph Crowder, "The Popularization of African American History: John Edward Bruce as Historian, Bibliophile, and Negro History Advocate," unpublished paper, pp. 258-268, Ralph Crowder, John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-Trained Black Historian (New York, New York University Press, 2004).

(66) Ibid. pp. 225-228.

(67) Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist And the Racial Mountain," The Nation, June 23, 1926.

(68) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, p. 1.

(69) Ibid, p. 7-8; see also Martin Bernal's comments which are remarkably similar in his interview with Norm R. Allen in Free Inquiry, volume 10, no. 2 (Spring 1990).

(70) Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, p. 4.

(71) Ibid. p. 10.

(72) Ibid. p. 2.

(73) Ibid. p. 3.

Malik Simba (1)