Much was made in his Joel’s lifetime in the States, though not in Europe, where he was recognized early on, of the fact that he was not a man of academic letters. That very much misses the point. He was a man who had learned idiomatic German, French and Spanish, could do his research in all these languages besides English and speak the languages fluently. He did the leg work and knew what to look for in his research. To try to evaluate his contribution to anthropology, racial origins, historical research in the light of today’s basic academic requirements before anybody can get a foot in the door somewhere, is to look for Henry Ford’s degree in Engineering, John D. Rockefeller’s degree in Geology, etc. Advanced education was very rare at that time and that fact certainly neither stopped Henry Ford, nor Rockefeller, nor anybody else. Time marched on there, too, and today’s cars are as far removed from the early cars, oil drilling has evolved greatly, and so on.
In his research all over the world, by looking at the artifacts first-hand, he compiled a body of history as a pioneer, with all the glories and drawbacks of a pioneer, decades ahead of his time, a work that will stand as his monument and will have to be referred to in any U.S. teaching of “integrated” history, integrated in the proper meaning of the word, history taught in its proper perspective, without trying to gloss over historical facts for one reason or another.
In his book AFRICA’S GIFT TO AMERICA, Joel stated that more than one half the world’s cotton was grown by the Black man in the South by 1918. He perceived it as the Black man’s crop. Professor Robert W. Fogel, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for 1993 in Stockholm, wrote a book on slavery, “Time On The Cross”, in 1974, in which he argued that the owners of slaves looked upon slaves as economic assets and treated them as well as livestock, that slavery was an efficient system for growing cotton and that the system collapsed for political—not economic reasons (The New York Times, October 13, 1993).
As John H. Clarke stated in his introduction to WORLD’S GREAT MEN OF COLOR, Vol. I, “In biographical research Rogers journeyed further and accomplished more than any other writer before him.” Also, “in more than forty-five years of travel and research (two generations), he more than any other writer of his time, attempted to affirm the humanity of the African personality and to show the role that African people have played in the development of human history. This was singularly he major mission of his life, it was also the legacy that he left to his people and the world.”
As the New York Times Book Review of February 4, 1973, written by John Ralph Willis had it, in reviewing WORLD’S GREAT MEN OF COLOR, “Rogers’s reputation rests on two foundations. He brought African biography out of the backwater of world literature, and he removed the “Great Undiscussable” of sex-race as a formidable taboo for professional review.”
He did more than anyone else in the field, and had his writings been heeded, maybe we would not have the awful mess with our schools, with the inner cities.
He married when he thought that he had most of his work completed and, therefore, a free mind for yet another adventure, marriage. However, AFRICA’S GIFT TO AMERICA as well as THE FIVE NEGRO PRESIDENTS were written subsequently. Still, he put as much effort into being a lovely husband as he had previously put into his work. He had a stroke while in Washington, D.C., where we visited friends. We had spent all day at the National Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution, where he found interesting things for his new book. He planned to go back to the Library of Congress the next week, for further research on the OLMECS. While he had established long ago that there had been migration from Africa to South America around 500 A.D., again something only validated after his lifetime, which accounted for some of the physiogonomies he found on the monuments, he wanted to write in depth about the OLMECS...........
He died on March 26, 1966 in New York. His work is his own monument to a brilliant, committed, highly idealistic man. To quote him, “…do we consider a man great because of the degree to which his life and actions affected humanity?” (World’s Great Men of Color, Vol. I, How and Why This Book Was Written, p. 21). Using this criterion alone, he was a great man. Ave atque vale.
Helga Rogers
1995
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Shakespeare.
QUIZ
I. In what very important respect of population does the Aframerican differ now from all the other various groups of which the United States is composed, including the Indian, but is like the French, German, English, Belgian, and other peoples in Europe?
II. When did the seizure of a Negro woman as a slave in the United States lead to a war of two years in the United States in which 20.026 U. S. Army troops were engaged and during which a troop of 110 white soldiers, was led by a trusted Negro into a trap where all but four were massacred?
III. In what American State is marriage between white and black legal in one part of the State, and punishable with two years’ imprisonment in the other part?
IV. A Negro girl saved George Washington from certain death at the beginning of the Revolution. Who was she?
V. When did Abraham Lincoln order back into slavery a half a million or more Negroes who had been declared free by one of his subordinates?
VI. What American vice-President because of his color and his features was publicly denounced in Congress and in the press as being a Negro?
VII. Beside the fact that the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery what most amazing fact is true of it?
100 AMAZING FACTS
1. The white population of New York is a third more illiterate than the Negro one.
2. Benjamin Banneker, a Negro astronomer, made the first clock made in America in 1754.
3. The word, “coffee”, comes from Caffa, Ethiopia, where it was first used and where it still grows wild.
4. George Washington sent a Negro slave to Barbados to be exchanged for a hogshead of molasses, a cask of rum and “other good old spirits”, in 1776.
5. The Negro arrived in the New World free from tuberculosis, and syphilis, or other venereal disease. Livingstone, the famous African missionary, and a medical doctor says, Syphilis “dies out in the African interior. It seems incapable of permanence in any form in persons of pure African blood.” Syphilis originated in Europe in 1494, when there was a great epidemic of it. As this was two years after the discovery of the New World, it was erroneously believed to have been brought back by the sailors of Columbus.
THE ARTS
6. The Negro was the first artist. The oldest drawings and carvings yet discovered were executed by the Negro peoples over 15,000 years ago in Southern France, Northern Spain, Palestine, South Africa, and India. The drawings are on rocks, the carvings on bone; basalt and ivory.
7. The oldest known representation of the human body is that of a Negro woman It was carved by a Negro sculptor of Grimaldi race from 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. It is called “The Venus of Willendorf” after the place in Austria where it was found, and is in the Vienna Museum.
8. Beethoven, the world’s greatest musician, was without a doubt a dark mulatto. He was called “The Black Spaniard.” His teacher, the immortal Joseph Haydn, who wrote the music for the former Austrian National Anthem, was colored, too.
9. Jose Vasconcelos (El Negrito Poeta), born of African Congo parents at Almolonga, Mexico, about 1710, wrote verses that were so popular that they entered into Mexican