Joel Augustus Rogers
Joel Augustus Rogers (September 6, 1880 – March 26, 1966) was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and amateur historian who focused on the history of Africa; as well as the African diaspora.
He challenged prevailing ideas about scientific racism and the social construction of race, demonstrated the connections between civilizations, and traced achievements of ethnic Africans, including some with mixed European ancestry.
[1] His book World's Great Men of Color was recognized by John Henrik Clarke as being his greatest achievement.
His parents could afford to give Rogers and his ten siblings only a rudimentary education, but stressed the importance of learning.
Rogers used this debate to air many of his personal philosophies and to debunk stereotypes about black people and white racial superiority.
The porter's arguments and theories are pulled from a plethora of sources, classical and contemporary, and run the gamut from history and anthropology to biology.
They have accepted the white man's religion pretty much in the same manner as, if they had remained in Africa, they would have worn his old tin cans, as a charm.
As I sometimes watch these people howling and hullaballooing, I cannot but think that any other process, religious or otherwise, would have served just as well as a vehicle for the release of their emotions, and that, so far as Jesus is concerned, any other rose by that name would smell as sweet to them.
When questioned about "Mohammedism" by the Senator, Dixon responds, In the 1920s, Rogers worked as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise.
As a newspaper correspondent, Rogers covered such events as the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia for the New York Amsterdam News.
He wrote for a variety of other black newspapers and journals: Crisis, American Mercury, The Messenger Magazine, the Negro World and Survey Graphic.
He devoted a significant amount of his professional life to unearthing facts about people of African ancestry, intending these findings to be a refutation of contemporary racist beliefs about the inferiority of blacks.
He falsely asserted that several historical figures previously classified or assumed to be "white" (European), including Aesop, Cleopatra, and Hannibal, were "black".
Rogers commented on the partial black ancestry of some prominent Europeans, including Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas, père.
Similarly, Rogers claimed that several portraits of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a direct ancestor of the British royal family, depicting her with "broad nostrils and heavy lips" indicated a "Negroid strain."
Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., said that Rogers' pamphlet would "get the "Black History Wishful Thinking Prize," if one existed.
Rogers' research in these works was directed to examining migration and movement of populations, and evidence for intermarriage and interracial unions throughout human history.
He believed that color prejudice generally evolved from issues of domination and power between two physiologically different groups.
Within these works, Rogers questioned the concept of race, the origins of racial differentiation, and the root of the "color problem".
While traveling in Europe, he frequented libraries, museums, and castles, finding sources that helped him document African ancestry and history.
His scholarship was meant to shed light on hitherto unexamined areas of Africana history, as well as combat the stereotypes of inferiority that were attributed to black people.
Rogers challenged that the color of skin did not determine intellectual genius, and that Africans had contributed more to the world than was previously acknowledged.
He used history as a tool to bolster his ideas about humanism, and his scholarship to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries.
[11] Some critics have focused on his lack of a formal education as a hindrance to producing scholarly work; others suggested the fact that he was self-taught liberated him from many academic and methodological restrictions.
While his work has often been classified as Afrocentric and outside mainstream history, his main contribution to academia was his nuanced analysis of the concept of race.
