52. There were three African Popes of Rome: Victor (189-199 A. D.); Melchiades (311-312); and St. Gelasius (496 A. D.). It was Melchiades who led Christianity to final triumph against the Roman Empire.
53. The celestial saint of Germany is St. Maurice, a pure Negro. While in command of a Roman legion in Gaul (Switzerland), in 287 A. D., he refused to attack the Christians when ordered to do so by the Emperor Maximian Herculius, for which he was killed. His picture is in many German cathedrals and museums sometimes with the German eagle on his head. Recent pictures of Hitler, nearly 1700 years later, show Hitler also with the same emblem on his head.
RULERS
54. On November 15, 218 B. C., Hannibal, a full-blooded Negro, marching through conquered territory in Spain and France, performed the astounding feat of crossing the Alps. With only 26,000 of his original force of 82,000 men remaining, he defeated Rome, the mightiest military power of that age, who had a million men, in every battle for the next fifteen years. Hannibal is the father of military strategy. His tactics are still taught in the leading military academies of the United States, England, France, Germany, and other lands.
55. Yusuf, a king from Upper Senegal, Africa, saved Moorish civilization in Spain in 1086. The Moors were being pushed out by the white Christians of Germanic descent. Yusuf crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with only 15,000 men, most of them pure blacks, and with 10,000 more from the Moors met the white king, Alphonso VI, at Zalacca. The latter had an army of 70,000, nearly three times as great, but Yusuf inflicted a terrific defeat on him. The flower of white knighthood was destroyed in that battle. Among those who fell later before the military prowess of Yusuf was Roderigo Diaz de Bivar, known as “The Cid,” and the greatest figure of the heroic age of Spain.
56. In 1538, Askia The Great, Emperor of Songhay, ruled an empire that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Chad, and larger than Western Europe. His capital was Timbuctoo.
57. The first World War in history was started by Abraha, Negro emperor and ex-slave, when he attacked Mecca, Arabia, in 569 A. D. This war lasted for more than a thousand years and stretched from France to beyond China. It brought about the fall, of several great empires, one of them the Later Roman Empire, capital Constantinople in 1453 A. D.
58. Muley Ismael, Emperor of Morocco, whose mother was a Negro slave, had 25,000 white slaves captured on the seas or on the coasts of Europe and the British Isles, to build his palace at Meknes. Muley Ismael’s stables were the vastest in existence with stalls for 12,000 horses. Muley Ismael’s ships raided the coasts of Europe for slaves until his death in 1727.
59. John VI, King of Portugal, a dark mulatto, was the maker of modern Brazil. Transferring his throne to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, he ruled Portugal from Brazil. This is the first and only time a European country has been ruled by an American one.
60. Pedro I, colored son of John VI, became first emperor of Brazil in 1822. Pedro I married the sister of Napoleon’s second wife. Gloria, Pedro’s daughter, became Queen of Portugal and was a sister-in-law of Victoria, Queen of England. Many members of European royalty trace their ancestry to the Negro ruler, John VI.
61. Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, a colored man, was the founder of the present royal family of Sweden. Enlisting as a private in Napoleon’s army he rose to be field-marshal. In 1818 he ascended to the throne of Sweden as Charles XIV.
62. Cetewayo, King of Zululand, South Africa, massacred an entire British army sent against him in 1879, and a few days later defeated and killed the Prince Napoleon, heir to the French throne. Cetewayo taught the Europeans the skirmish line in warfare.
SLAVERY
63. The word, “slave,” was originally applied to white people. It comes from “Slav,” a Russian people captured by the Germans.
64. The first slaves held in the United States were not black, but white. They were Europeans, mostly British, who died like flies on the slave-ships across. On one voyage 1,100 perished out of 1,500. At another time 350 out of 400. In Virginia, white servitude was for a limited period, but was sometimes extended to life. In the West Indies, particularly in the case of the Irish, it was for life. White people were sold in the United States up to 1826, fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, was a runaway, and was advertised for in the newspapers.
65. Between 1526 and 1859 there were thirty-three slave revolts in the United States, one of which was that headed by Nat Turner of Virginia in 1831. With only six companions Turner set out to free the 3,000,000 slaves. The United States marines and two warships were sent against him after he had killed 55 whites, and captured several plantations. The Seminoles, or runaways of mixed Indian and Negro descent, of Florida, fought three wars with the United States to preserve their freedom.
66. In 1670, Virginia passed a law forbidding Negroes from buying white people. This was fifty-one years after the Negro had arrived in chains. The same law was repeated in 1748. Free Negroes bought white people in such numbers in Louisiana, that the state made a similar law in 1818.
67. White children were kidnapped in the British Isles at the rate of several thousands yearly in the 17th and 18th Centuries and sold into slavery in America and the West Indies. Sometimes they were bootlegged and sold as Negroes. White Americans, North and South, were also kidnapped or seduced and sold as Negroes as late as 1859. One of the most celebrated cases of a white person sold as a Negro was Sally Muller, who was held in servitude in Louisiana for twenty-six years. Court after court ruled against her. Finally her birth certificate was dug up in Germany and she was freed by the Supreme Court in 1818.
68. Prince Abd-El-Rahman, a highly educated grandson of the Emperor of Timbuctoo, was captured in battle and sold into slavery in America. Years later a white doctor, who had travelled in his land, saw him at Natchez, Miss. Rahman was freed in 1829. $4,000 was paid for the liberation of his children.
69. In 1860 there were 487,000 free Negroes in the United States some of whom owned slaves. C. D. Wilson estimates that there were 6,230 Negro slave-holders. The tax returns of Charleston, S. C., for 1860 showed 132 Negro slave-holders with 390 slaves. The Negro slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the Civil War.
70. The Brazilian Emancipation Proclamation of 1888 freed all the slaves on the day of promulgation; the British Emancipation of 1834, not until four years later; while the American Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 when issued “freed” those slaves whom Abraham Lincoln had no power to free, and permitted the continued enslavement of those whom he had the power to free.
71. In Arabia and parts of North Africa, white persons, mostly women, are still held as slaves as are many Negroes. Sometimes the owners of these white slaves are Negroes.
SPORTS
72. The fastest bicyclist the world has ever known was Marshall (Major) W. Taylor. He defeated the champions of Europe and America. His greatest feat was the winning of the one-mile motor-paced race in 1 minute, 19 seconds. He died in 1932 at the age of 54.
73. The Aframerican, though but a dot in the world’s population holds, or has held an unusually high percentage of world athletic championships. There have been thirteen world boxing champions. Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, heavyweight; John Henry Lewis, light heavyweight; Tiger Flowers, middleweight; Joe Walcott, Dixie Kid, Jack Thompson, welterweight; Henry Armstrong, three titles, welterweight, lightweight, bantamweight; Joe Gans, lightweight; George Dixon, two titles, bantamweight and featherweight.
Negroes have held ten Olympic titles: De Hart Hubbard, broad jump, 1924; Eddie Tolan, two titles, 100 metres and 200 metres, 1932; Ed Gordon, broad jump, 1932; Cornelius Johnson, high jump, 1936; Jesse Owens, three titles, 100 and 200 metres and broad jump, 1936; John Woodruff, 800 metres, 1936; Archie Williams, 400 metres, 1936.