Joel Augustus Rogers: Biography from Answers.com

historian; writer; columnist

Personal Information

Born Joel Augustus Rogers ca. 1883 in Negril, Jamaica (then a British colony); died on September 6, 1966; son of a schoolteacher; one of 11 children; came to United States, 1906; became U.S. citizen, 1916; married Helga Bresenthal.
Education: Self-educated.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in British army for four years.
Memberships: American Geographical Society, American Academy of Political Science, Société d'Anthropologie, Paris, France.

Career

Historian. Wrote first book, From "Superman" to Man, 1917; became columnist, Pittsburgh Courier, and served as foreign correspondent in Ethiopia, 1930s; self published most of his own works; wrote over 15 nonfiction works; also wrote fiction and contributed to historical periodicals; investigated history of interracial relationships and marriage in three-volume Sex and Race, 1940-44; popular handbook 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro went into twenty-fourth edition, 1963.

Life's Work

Decades before there was anything like an academic discipline of black studies, J.A. Rogers was a one-man historical army fighting to rescue the cultural contributions of Africans and African-descended peoples from the neglect to which white-dominated history-writing had consigned them. Publishing his own books and working without the benefit of any education beyond the high school level, Rogers produced a long series of books between 1917 and 1966. An indefatigable researcher, he also had the gift of putting his ideas in words that touched ordinary readers; his books brought him a modest living, and many of them went through multiple editions.

Joel Augustus Rogers was born in 1883 (some sources give the year as 1880) in Negril, Jamaica, at that time part of Great Britain's Caribbean empire. His father Samuel was a schoolteacher, but as the family grew it slipped deeper into poverty. Rogers's mother died after four children were born; his father remarried and had seven more children. Taking a job as a plantation manager, he was still barely able to feed his large family.

Joined British Army

Rogers escaped rural Jamaica by joining the British army, serving for four years as an artilleryman. He emigrated to the United States in 1906. Although he became a U.S. citizen in 1917, his first years in the country were difficult ones and did much to shape the attitudes he would hold for the rest of his life. Like other West Indians who came to the United States from predominantly black home countries, Rogers faced pervasive discrimination. Even as a student in school he had resisted doctrines of white superiority, and in the United States he thought back on the accomplishments of black West Indians who had excelled within the British educational and military systems. He grew into a fervent opponent of American racism.

For a time Rogers flirted with communism and socialism but was discouraged by the failure of these ideologies to address the central problem of racial prejudice. Like his compatriot Marcus Garvey, Rogers realized that the empowerment of African Americans depended upon a needed prior revolution in their internalized self-images. Thus Rogers set out as a writer to "disseminate truth in spite of the barriers of nation, race, or creed and to make our beloved country a real Republic," as he wrote in the introduction to his first book, From "Superman" to Man (which was quoted by W. Burghardt Turner in The Black Scholar).

That book, published in 1917, set out in short form many of the ideas on which Rogers would elaborate later in his career. Cast as a conversation between a black train porter and a southern politician, the book took issue with prevailing racist ideas by pointing to the accomplishments recorded throughout history by Africans and their descendants in other parts of the world. Largely self-taught, Rogers learned four languages (French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish), and set out to research the roles African peoples had played in world history. His travels took him to libraries and archives in Europe and Africa.

Covered Events in Ethiopia

Rogers made a living for a time as a journalist, writing for the Pittsburgh Courier and other papers with a mainly black readership. He wrote regular columns on black history and also served as a foreign correspondent, covering the coronation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1930 and returning to Africa to report on the war against invading Italian fascists that broke out in Ethiopia in 1936 and formed a prologue to World War II. In covering that conflict, Rogers may have become the first African-American war correspondent. Historian George S. Schuyler (quoted by Turner in The Black Scholar) noted that Rogers did "more than anyone else to popularize Negro history ... it was J. A. Rogers who week after week brought these facts to the attention of the Negro public."

In the meantime, Rogers continued to work on what became a voluminous series of books, all but a few self-published. In the 1920s he wrote a short book about the Maroons, descendants of escaped slaves in the Caribbean and South America (Maroons of the West Indies and South America, 1921) and an anti-Ku Klux Klan tract (The Ku Klux Klan Spirit, 1923). By the 1930s his long labors in the field of biography were ready to bear fruit (he once said, according to Turner, that "biography will ever be the highest and most civilizing form of literature"). Large biographical tomes such as World's Greatest Men of African Descent (1931) and the two-volume World's Great Men of Color (1946) were accompanied by smaller works more suited to a general readership, such as 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro, which was first published in the 1930s and reached its twenty-fourth edition by 1963.

Discussed Jefferson's Slave Mistress

Rogers also specifically focused on the question of interracial relationships and marriages. Here his writings are especially keen in anticipating issues that emerged with greater clarity later in the twentieth century. In such works as the three-volume Sex and Race (1940-1944) and Nature Knows No Color-Line (1952), he raised the issue, for example, of Thomas Jefferson's children by his slave Sally Hemings (later confirmed by DNA sampling techniques), and pointed to the partially African heritage of various famous historical figures. More generally, he argued that the gradual mixture of the races was a nearly constant feature of human history.

Rogers continued to write for much of his long life. In the early 1950s he used his newspaper columns to come to the defense of the pioneering black historian W. E. B. DuBois when DuBois ran into trouble with the U.S. government after emigrating to Ghana. In 1959 Rogers completed Africa's Gift to America, which outlined the contributions blacks made to the exploration of the continent; this theme, too, would be taken up by many other writers in the following decades. One of his several novels, She Walks in Beauty, was published in 1963 near the end of his life.

Rogers died after a stroke at his longtime home in New York's Harlem neighborhood. Sources disagree about his death date, suggesting perhaps how little serious attention he received. Most sources, however, state that he died on September 6, 1966. Much of what is known of his life was communicated to biographers by his widow, Helga Bresenthal Rogers. Rogers was a self-taught and self-motivated historian whose prolific career clarified and applauded the accomplishments of many Africans and African Americans.

Works

Selected writings

From "Superman" to Man, 1917.
As Nature Leads: An Informal Discussion of the Reason Why Negro and Caucasian Are Mixing in Spite of Opposition, 1919.
The Approaching Storm and How It May Be Averted: An Open Letter to Congress and the 48 Legislatures of the United States of America, 1920.
The Maroons of the West Indies and South America, 1921.
The Ku Klux Klan Spirit: A Brief Outline of the History of the Ku Klux Klan Past and Present, 1923.
100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro, 1934.
Real Facts about Ethiopia, 1935.
World's Greatest Men and Women of African Descent, 1935.
Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and Lands, 1940-44.
World's Great Men of Color, 1946.
Nature Knows No Color Line, 1952.
Africa's Gift to America: The Afro-American in the Making and Saving of the United States, 1959.
Facts about the Negro, 1960.
She Walks in Beauty (fiction), 1963.
Selected Writings of Joel Augustus Rogers, ed. Kinya Kiorgozi, 1989.

Early life and education

Joel Augustus Rogers was born 6 September 1880 in Negril, Jamaica. One of eleven children, he was the son of mixed-race parents who were a minister and schoolteacher. His parents were not able to afford to give Rogers or his ten siblings more than a rudimentary education, but stressed the importance of learning.

Emigration and career

Rogers emigrated from Jamaica to the United States in 1906, where he settled in Harlem, New York. There he lived most of his life. He was there during the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African-American artistic and intellectual life in numerous fields. Rogers became a close personal friend of the Harlem-based intellectual and activist Hubert Harrison.

While living in Chicago for a time in the 1920s, Rogers worked as a Pullman porter and as a reporter for the Chicago Enterprise. His job of Pullman porter allowed Rogers to travel and observe a wide range of people. Through this travel, Rogers was able to feed his appetite for knowledge, by using various libraries in the cities which he visited. Rogers self-published the results of his research in several books.

Rogers' first book From "Superman" to Man, self-published in (1917), attacked notions of African inferiority. From Superman to Man is a polemic against the ignorance that fuels racism. Its title is a twist on contemporary works, both George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman and Nietzsche’s idea of the “Superman.” The central plot revolves around a debate between a Pullman porter and a white racist, Southern politician. In essence, the porter is the author's alter ego. Rogers used this debate to air many of his personal philosophies and to debunk the heinous 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, anthropology to biology. Like the novel’s protagonist, Rogers would devote his professional life to such interdisciplinary research. Many of the ideas that permeated Rogers’ later work can be seen germinating in From Superman to Man. Rogers addresses issues such as: the lack of scientific support for the idea of race, black historical vindicationism, and the fact of intermarriage and unions among peoples throughout history. All of these ideas became focal points for his later writing.

In the 1920s Rogers worked as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise. He was a sub-editor of Marcus Garvey's short-lived Daily Negro Times. As a newspaper correspondent, he covered such notable events as the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia for the New York Amsterdam News. He wrote for a variety of black newspapers and journals: (Crisis, American Mercury, The Messenger, the Negro World and Survey Graphic). One of his interviews was with Marcus Garvey in prison (New York Amsterdam News, 17 November 1926).

Rogers served as the only black US war correspondent during World War II. The diversity of his positions proved advantageous as he sought to highlight African participation in a global context.

Rogers was a meticulous researcher, astute scholar and concise writer.^{[citation needed]} He traveled tirelessly on his quest for knowledge, which often took him directly to the source. While traveling in Europe, he frequented libraries, museums, and castles, finding sources that helped him prove African ancestry and history that the world could and should celebrate. He challenged the biased viewpoint of Eurocentric historians and anthropologists.

Rogers gathered what he called “the bran of history”. The bran of history was the uncollected, unexamined history of the world, and his interest was the history of black people. Rogers intended that the neglected parts of history would become part of the mainstream body of Western history. He saw black inclusion in white historical discourses as helping to bridge racial divides. His scholarship was meant to shed light on hitherto unexamined areas of Africana history. This historical goal made Rogers a vindicationist scholar. Vindicationist history attempted to combat the stereotypes of inferiority that were attributed to black people.

Rogers asserted that the color of skin did not determine intellectual genius, and that Africans had contributed more to the world than was previously acknowledged. He publicized the great black civilizations that had flourished in Africa during antiquity. He devoted his scholarship to vindicating a place for Africana people within Western history. According to Rogers, many ancient African civilizations had been primal molders of Western civilization and culture.

Rogers’ work was also concerned with "the Great Black Man" theory of history. This theory presented history, specifically black history, as a mural of achievements by prominent black people. Rogers devoted a significant amount of his professional life to unearthing facts about people of African ancestry. He intended these findings to be a refutation of contemporary racist beliefs about the inferiority of blacks. Books such as 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, Sex and Race, and World’s Great Men of Color, all described remarkable black people throughout the ages and cited significant achievements of the black genius.

Rogers commented on the partial black ancestry of some prominent Europeans, including Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas, père. Similarly, Rogers was among those who asserted that a direct ancestor of the British royal family, Charlotte Sophia, had a remote ancestor who was of African origin.

Rogers’ theories about race, sex and color can be found in the books Nature Knows No Color-Line, World’s Great Men of Color and the pamphlet Five Negro Presidents, all of which deal with the ideas of race, sex and color. In the latter, he provided what he said was evidence that there had been 19th and 20th century presidents of the United States who had partial black ancestry. His research was superficial and poorly sourced. Others who have used his work have ignored evidence that contradicts it.

Within these works, Rogers questioned the concept of race, the origins of racial differentiation, and the root of the “color problem.” Rogers felt that the “color problem” was that color [race] was used as social, political and economic determining factors.

Rogers astutely surmised that a large percentage of ethnic differences were the result of sociological factors. However, in Rogers’ opinion, often the differences between groups were attributed primarily to physical differences, i.e. color [race]. Rogers deals with the themes of race and sex in the eponymous Race and Sex and also in Nature Knows No Color-Line. Rogers’ research in these works was directed to examining miscegenation and how that has left a black “strain” in Europe and the Americas since the dawn of time.

In Nature Knows No Color-Line, Rogers examined the origins of racial hierarchy and the color problem. Rogers stated that the origins of the race problem had never been adequately examined or discussed. Rogers believed that color prejudice generally evolved from issues of domination and power between two physiologically different groups. According to Rogers, color prejudice was then used a rationale for domination, subjugation and warfare. Societies developed myths and prejudices in order to pursue their own interests at the expense of other groups. Rogers was trying to show that there is nothing innate about color prejudice. There is no natural distaste for darker skin by lighter-skinned people. Likewise, there is no natural aversion for lighter skin by darker-skinned people.

With these assertions, Rogers was attempting to point out the absurdity of racial divisions. Rogers' belief in one race, humanity, precluded the idea of several different ethnic races. In this, Rogers was a humanist. Rogers used vindicationist history as a tool to bolster his ideas about humanism. Rogers used his scholarship to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries.

Rogers was self-financed, self-educated, self-published. Some critics have focused on Rogers' lack of a formal education as a hindrance to producing scholarly work; others suggested Rogers' autodidacticism freed him from many academic and methodological restrictions. He made himself free to tackle the difficult racial issues with which he dealt. As an autodidact, Rogers followed his research into various disciplines that more formally educated scholars may have been loath to attempt. Thus, Rogers’ scholarship incorporates elements of history, anthropology, art history, sociology and archaeology. His works are complete with detailed references. That he documented his work to encourage scrutiny of his facts was a testament to his due diligence, work ethic and commitment to not only African people, but the world, its history and culture.

Rogers clearly articulated ideas about race that were informed by anthropology and biology, rather than social convention. He used vindicationism not as end in itself, but as a tool to underscore his humanist beliefs, to illustrate the unity of humanity as a people. He discarded the non-scientific definition of race and pursued his own ideas about humanity’s interconnectedness. Thus, although the work of Rogers has often been relegated to the controversial genre of Afrocentric history, his true contribution to Africana scholarship was his nuanced analysis of the concept of race.

His work allowed him to become a member of professional associations such as the Paris Society of Anthropology, the American Geographical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Academy of Political Science.^[2]

Marriage and family

Some of Rogers's books were published by "Helga M. Rogers," but his New York Times obituary (3/27/1966) says his widow was "Helga Biesenthal Rogers," and Black Biography (at //www.answers.com/topic/joel-augustus-rogers, which gets his death date wrong) lists her as "Helga Bresenthal Rogers."

Legacy and honors

Rogers, in the words of Dr. John Henrik Clarke, "looked at the history of people of African origin, and showed how their history is an inseparable part of the history of mankind."

Joel Augustus Rogers died in New York on March 26, 1966^[3] in New York City. He was survived by his wife Helga M. Rogers.

Bibliography

From Superman to Man
As Nature Leads: an informal discussion of the reason why Negro and Caucasian are mixing in spite of opposition.
The Approaching Storm and How It May Be Averted.
The Ku Klux Spirit: a brief outline of the history of the Ku Klux Klan past and present.
World's Greatest Men of African Descent.
One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro: with complete shortcut to the world history of the Negro.
World's Greatest Men and Women of African Descent.
The Real Facts about Ethiopia.
Your History from the Beginning of Time to the Present (a special feature in the Pittsburgh Courier)
Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in all Ages and all Lands (3 vols.).
World's Great Men of Color (2 vols.).
Nature Knows No Color Line: research in the Negro ancestry in the white race.
Africa's Gift to America: the Afro-American in the making and saving of the United States with new supplement: Africa and its potentialities.
Facts about the Negro.
"Five Negro Presidents", a pamphlet about African ancestry of US presidents

Citations

^ "Joel Augustus Rogers", African-American Registry, accessed 20 Jan 2009
^ "Joel Augustus Rogers", African-American Registry, accessed 20 Jan 2009
^ "Joel Rogers, 85, Author Of Afro-American Books", The New York Times', March 27, 1966, accessed May 20, 2007

References

Garvey, Marcus M. (1987). The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05817-8
Harrison, Hubert H. (2001). A Hubert Harrison Reader. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6470-2
Rogers, Helga M. "Biographical sketch to J. A. Rogers", 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, With Complete Proof: A Shortcut to the World History of the Negro (St. Petersburg, Florida: Helga M. Rogers, Publisher, 1995).
Rashidi, Runoko. “The Life and Legacy of Joel Augustus Rogers: Chronicler of a Glorious African Past: Part 1,” The Global African Community: Articles [website]; available from http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/rogers.html
Sandoval, Valerie. “The Bran of History: An Historiography Account of the Work of J. A. Rogers", The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Journal, 4 (Spring 1978).
Thorpe, Earl E. Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1971.
Thorpe, Earl E. The Central Theme of Black History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1969.
Thorpe, Earl E. Negro Historians in the United States. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Fraternal Press, 1958.
Turner, W. Burghardt. "Joel Augustus Rogers, An African American Historian". Negro History Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 2. February, 1972

External links

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Joel Augustus Rogers

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