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 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 spirits.
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 of 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.
6. The Negro was the
first artist. The oldest drawings and carvings yet discovered were
executed by the Negro people 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 scupltor 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 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 Peta), born of African Congo parents at Almolonga, Mexico,
about 1710, wrote verses that were so popular that they enetered
into Mexican folk-lore and were printed annually on the calendars of
Mexico until 1872, one hundred and twelve years after his
death.
Ancient Civilizations
10. The Grimaldi, a
Negro race, lived in europe as late as 12,000 years ago. Two
complete Grimaldi skeletons are in the Musuem of Monaco, near Monte
Carlo. Abundant traces of their culture have been unearthed in
Southern and Central Europe.
11. Elam, a mighty Negro
civilization of Persia, flourished about 2900 BC and is perhaps
older than Egypt or Ethopia. One of its later Negro kings, Kudur
nakunta, conquered Chaldea and Babylon and brought back to his
capital, Susa, rich treasures among which was the famous statue of
the goddess, Nana. Later it became the capital of Cyrus the Great
and Darius. Susa is the Shushan of the Bible where Esther, the
Jewess, sought the favor of King Ahaserus of Persia and
Ethopia.
12. Cheops, a Negro,
built the Great Pyramid, on of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World. It is 451 feet high, has 2,500,000 blocks of granite, each
two and a half tons, covers 13 acres, took 100,000 men thirty years
to build and was completed in 3730 BC.
13. There were at least
eighteen Ethiopian or unmixed Negro rulers of Ancient Egypt, the
best known of which is Piankhi. Leaving his country in Central
Africa, Piankhi conquered all Egypt to the mouth of the Nile in 750
BC.
14. The Ganges, the
sacred river of India, is named after an Ethiopian king of that name
who conquered Asia as far as this river.
15. The most ancient
lineage in the world is that of the Ethiopian royal family. It is
said to be older than that of King George VI's by 6130 years. The
Emperor Haile Selassi I, ruler of Ethiopia, traces his ancestry to
King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and beyond that to Cush, 6280
BC.
16. Negroes lived in
America thousands of years before Columbus. Central American
monuments show numerous carvings of them as gods. When Columbus came
to the New World, Negroes had been crossing from Africa to South
America a distance of 1600 miles. The first white men to reach the
American mainland, tell of seeing Negroes. Columbus who visited
South America said that he heard of them there.
17. The present Negro
race of Africa perhaps did not originate there, but Asia and
Oceania. The earliest inhabitants of Africa were not black but
brown. Today the peoples of mixed and unmixed Negro descent living
in Asia and Oceania probably exceed in number the present Negro
population of Africa. India has millions of Negroes. the purest
Negro types are in Southern Asia. In 1923, Dr Joseph Rock, United
States Department of Agriculture discovered a hitherto unknown Negro
race, the Nakhis, 200,000 in number, in Southern China. In 1934,
E.W.P. Chinnery discovered an unknown Negro people in New Guinea,
near Australia. he reports that they have a civilization superior to
their neighbors, who live under white rule.
18. In the United States
Army Drafts in World War I, the Negro proved physically fitter than
the white man. "For every 100 men physically examined the ratio of
colored men found physically qualified for general military service
was substatially higher than the ratio of the white men by just five
percent, maely 74.60 against 69.71."
Illiteracy and Intelligence
19. The peoples of
Southern Europe, including Italy, and most of those of Eastern
Europe, including Russia, are more illiterate than the Negroes of
the United States. In seventy years Negro illiteracy has fallen off
about 80 percent. In 1870 it was 82 per cent; in 1930,
16.3.
20. Aframerican
illiteracy, is three times higher than the white one, nevertheless,
when certain states are matched against certain others, there are
suprising comparisions. For instance, the Negroes of California,
Minnesota, New York, Nevada, South Dakota, Oregon, and Washington
are less illiterate than the Native Whites of white parentage in
Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia,
Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico.
New York, Minnesota, Oregon, and South Dakota Negroes are less
illiterate by 100 to 400 percent than the foreign-born Whites of all
the states, save one.
21. In the United States
Army Intelligence tests during World War I, the Negroes of
Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio led the Whites of
Mississsippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Georgia by from one to seven
percent.
22. Two centuries ago
the Negroes of South Africa and the Northern Europeans both
practised a form of cannicalism that was strikingly similar. Of the
vital organs of slain foes, the Negroes made a muti, a charm,
against evil. Sometimes they ate the heart of a brave man believing
that it gave added courage. The Europeans would roast or dry the
bodies of hanged criminals. Of these they made mumia, a medicine for
internal and external use, which was supposed to have peculiar
curative charm. In 1683 when the Germans defeated the Turks at Ofen,
Switzerland, thousands of surrendered Turks were treated in this
manner. an army surgeon, who was present, wrote: "None were given
grace. All were massacred,a nd in most cases they were skinned, the
fatty parts were roasted, and genitals cut off, dried,a nd put into
big sacks. And of this they made precious mumia." Regular
cannibalism existed in Germany as late as 1650.
Exploration
23. Estevanico, a Negro
from Morocco, was one of a party of four to cross the North American
continent in 1536 for the first time. The journey took nine years.
In 1539 he headed an expedition that discovered Arizona and New
Mexico. Estevanico's travels served to open up the Southwest and the
States west of Florida, as far as the Pacific.
24. The founder of the
City of Chicago was Baptist Pointe de Saible, a Negro, in
1779.
25. Tippoo Tib, a Negro
trader in slaves and ivory, from Zanzibar, East Africa, was the
first civilized man to penetrate the center of Africa. He explored
territory nearly as large as the United States. Stanley, Weismann,
Cameron, and other white explorers followed in his path. He died in
1905, very rich.
26. For 2234 years human
beings had been trying to reach the top of the world. Thousands of
lives and millions of dolaars were lost in the attempt. On April 6,
1909, Matthew Henson, a New York Negro, was the first of a party of
six to do so. He is now (1943) the only human being alive to have
stood there. The first Artic explorer was Pytheas, a Greek, who
perished in the attempt in 325 BC.
Science and Invention
27. Jan Ernest
Matzeliger, a Dutch West Indian Negro living in Lynn, Mass.,
invented the first machine for sewing teh soles of shoes to the
uppers. This invention, which was eleven years in the making,
revolutionized the industry and gave shoe supremacy to the United
States. It made several millionaires, one of whom left $4,000,000 to
Harvard University. Overwork and privation hastened Matzeliger to
his grave in 1889 at the age of 37. He left a few shares of stock to
a white church, which later saved it from being sold for
debt.
28. George Washington
Carver of Tuskegee Institute, one of the world's greatest
agricultural chemists, was awarded teh Roosevelt Medal in 1939 for
"distinguished service in the field of science." From the peanut he
has extracted 285 products,a nd from the sweet potato, 118. Dr.
Carver was born a slave. Thomas Edison once offered him a large
salary to take charge of one of the Edison laboratories but Carver
refused in order to continue the work he had begun with Booker T
Washington as Tuskegee Institute.
Jews and Ethiopians
29. The Mohammedans
believe that Moses was a black man. Their Bible, the Koran, says so.
God told Moses to put his hand into his bosom. The Koran says that
it came out white. The commentators declare that Moses' hand could
not have been white before, and that the miracle Jehovah intended
was makin the black skin white, and then turning it black again. The
Septuagint, or Greek Bible, agrees with the Koran.
30. The characters of
the Bible are largely Negroes. the Jews were slaves to the Egyptians
for nearly 430 years. Only seventy Jews went to Egypt with Jacob.
The Bible says that 600,000 men left with Moses, and which according
to Haushoffer, meant a total of 3,154,000 with women and children.
For this large number to have left mixing with the Egyptians, who
were black, must have taken place on a vast scale. About 12,000,000
Negroes were brought to the New World. Imagine how much of their
original color and culture the latter would take with them should
they "return" to Africa and your realize how much of the original
Jew remained in only those seventy Jews after four centuries.
Tacitus, Roman historian of 90 AD, says that the Romans of his day
popularly believed that the Jews, which then abounded in Europe,
came from Ethiopia, the land of the Blacks. The present white color
of the European and American Jew, is very likely due to the same
cause, as the fair skin and straight hair of large numbers of
Negroes. The Bible classes the Ethiopian and the Jew together, "Are
ye not as the children of Ethiopia unto me, O children of Isreal,
saith the Lord." Chaldea, the land in which the Jews originated, was
also a Negro land hence Abraham might also have been
Black.
31. The Falashas, or
Negro Jews of Ethiopia, led by Queen Judith, put the line of Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba off the throne of Ethiopia in 937 AD and
ruled for forty years. The Falashas assert that they are the
original Jews. They call themselves "The Beta-Isreal" or "The Chosen
People"
32. The Negro Jews of
India are not permitted to enter the same synagogues as the white
ones, nor to bury their dead in the same cemeteries.
Medicine
33. Imhotep of Ancient
Egypt, was the real Father of Medicine. He lived about 2300 BC
Greece and Rome had their knowledge of medicine from him. In Rome he
was worshipped as the Prince of Peace in the form of a black man.
His Ethiopian portraits show him a Negro. Imhotep was also Prime
Minister to King Zoser as well as the foremost architect of his
time. The saying, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die",
has been traced to him. Hippocrates, the so-called "Father of
Medicine" lived 2,000 years after Imhotep.
34. Aben Ali, an African
Negro, was private physician to Charles VII, King of Frances
(1403-1465). when the king fell dangerously ill at Toulouse, Aben
Ali was sent for and he cured him. Thereafter the king made him a
member of his suite.
35. Dr C. Tavares, an
African Negro, was the private physician to King Carlos I of
Portugal until the latter's death in 1908.
36. Dr. Daniel Williams,
Chicago surgeon who died in 1931, was the first to perform a
successful operation on the human heart.
Politics
37. France has had six
colored Cabinet Ministers -- Severiano de Heredia, 1887; Senator
Henri Lemery, 1915-1918, and 1934; Alcide Delmont, 1928; Bliase
Diagne, 1931; Gratien Candace, 1932; Gaston Monnerville, 1937. De
Heredia, as Minister of Public Works, built some of France's finest
roads.
38. Eugene Chen, one of
the most dynamic political figures of the present century, and
Minister of Foreign Affairs for China in 1927, was born of
Chinese-Negro parentage in Trinidad, West Indies, in 1878. He was
also secretary to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, first president of
China.
39. Persina, a Queen of
Ethiopia, 60 BC, presented her husband, Hydaspes, with a
light-colored child, "which color is strange among Ethiopians." She
declared it was due to the presence of a white statue in the room at
the time of conception. Similarly Maria Theresa of Spain and
Austria, wife of Louis XIV, King of France, bore him a mulatto
daughter in 1665. The Queen spent most of her time with a Negro
dwarf, named Nabo, while the King passed most of his time with the
beauties that thronged his court. The doctors explained the color of
the child by saying that the black man looked at the Queen. "It must
have been a very penetrating look", said the King, wrathfully. A
noted writer of that time attributed the color of a similar child,
born to a high noblewoman, to the mother's fondness for
chocolate.
40. Anna, a Negro
servant girl of Calavecchio, Italy, wife of a white muledriver,
became the concubine of Pope Clement VII. Her son, Alessandro, born
1511, became reigning Duke of Florence, and married Margaret, only
daughter of the Emperor Charles V, ruler of Germany, teh
Netherlands, Austria, and Spain in 1536.
41. White American
slave-holders used to induce white women to marry Negro slaves in
order to hold the women slaves for life.
42. Thomas Jefferson,
third president of the United States, and father of the Declaration
of Independence, was the father of a large number of mulatto
children. His wife protested long and loud to no avail. Patrick
Henry, another signer of that document, had a Negro son named
Melancthon.
43. Napoleon planned to
solve the color problem in Haiti by makin it legal for each man to
take three wives, one white, one mulatto, the other black. He had
several conferences with the theologians on "this grand measure" and
tried to win the consent of the Pope.
44. In 1787 while a
party of 351 freed Negroes was aboard ship at Portsmouth, England,
enroute to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities brought on
board sixty-two white women, prostitutes and others, whom they
wished to get rid of, and married them to as many men,a nd sent them
off to be the future mothers of the colony.
45. In the 1850's, Mrs.
Leybonn, an Englishwoman, was "Queen of the Slave-traders", at Rio
Pongo, one of the principal slave posts in West Africa. She had a
fort armed with cannon and armed by 300 devoted blacks. She had
three mulatto children by a Negro,a boy and two girls. One of the
latter married a white slave-trader, and the other,a British
Consul.
46. The Countess de
Beauharnais, who was related by marriage to Napoleon, married a
full-blooded Haitian Negro, name Castaing, who was a member of the
Paris Convention og 1792-1795.
Religion
47. The oldest and most
noted statue in the world bears the face of a Negro. It is the
Sphinx of Gizeh, which was worshipped as Horus, or Harmachis, the
Sun-God of Light and Life. It was erected about 5,000 BC. The Devil
which is now depicted as black, was once portrayed as White. When
the black man dominated the planet, he painted the forces of evil,
white. When the whites came into power, they shifted the colors. But
as late as 1500 the Ethiopians still depicted their gods and heroes
black, and their devils and villians, white. Father fernandez, a
Catholic missionary, who worked amongst them at this time, says,
"They paint Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and other saints in black
form; and devils and wicked men, white. Thus Christ and his apostles
are black and Judas, white. Annas, Caiphas, Pilate, Herod and the
Jews are white, while Micheal is black, and the Devil,
white."
48. Nearly all of the
ancient gods of the Old and New World were black and had woolly
hair. Buckley says, "From the woolly texture of the ahir I am
inclined to assign to the Buddha of India; the Fuhi of China; the
Xaha of the Japanese; and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, the same
and indeed an African, or rather, a Nubian origin." In the Bible,
God, or the Ancient of Days, is described as having "hair like the
pure wool." The earliest statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ in
Europe as far north as Russia, were black and Negroid.
49. The Bible really
originated in Ancient Egypt, where the population according to
Herodotus and Aristotle, wa sblack. Here the Jews recieved almost
all of their early culture. Prof. Breasted, leading Egyptologist,
says, "The ripe social and moral development of mankind in the Nile
Valley which 3000 years older than that of the Hebrews, contributed
essentially to the formation of Hebrew literature. Our moral
heritage therfore derives from a wider human past enormously older
than the Hebrews,and it has come to us rather THROUGH the Hebrews
than FROM them."
50. Psalms that read
liek those of the Bible were written by a Pharoah, Amenophis IV,
better know as "Akhenaton, teh Heretic King," 1300 BC or more than
400 years before David was born. Akhenaton, who was the father of
Tut-Ankh-Amen, was extremely Negro in type. He is called "the most
remarkable of the Pharoahs."
51. Ethiopians, that is
Negroes, agve to the world the first idea of right and wrong and
thus laid the basis of religion, and of all true culture and
civilization. The earliest exposition of this yet found is in the
so-called Memphite Drama, which is known only through a copy on a
slab of basalt made by order or an Ethiopian king in 700
BC.
52. There were three
African Popes of Rome: Victor (189-199 AD); Melchiades (311-312);
and St. Gelasius (496 AD). 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 AD, he refused to attack the
Christians when ordered to do so by the Emperor Maximiam 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
BC, 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 remianing, 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. Yusef, 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. Yusef crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with only 15,000 men,
most of them pure blacks,a nd 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 Yusef 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
Yusef 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 AD. 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 AD.
58. Muley Ismael,
Emperor of Morocco, whose mother was a Negro slave, had 25,000 white
slave 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.
Tranferring 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 the first emperor or 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 enitre British army send
against him in 1879,a nd 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. There 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 for 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 Lousiana, 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. Somtimes 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 Lousiana 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 Supremem 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 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 who 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 part
sof 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 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 meters and 200 meters, 1932; Ed Gordon, broad jump,
1932; Cornelius Johnson, high jump, 1936; Jesse Owens, three titles,
100 and 200 meters and broad jump, 1936; John Woodruff, 800 meters,
1936; Archie Williams, 400 meters, 1936. National and university
titles, and world record-breakin titles, in sports ahve been held by
the hundreds. Of 12 inter-collegiate championships compteted for on
June 1, 1940, Negroes won eight.
Warfare - Commanders
74. The Rock of
Gibraltar, the symbol of spirituality, is name after a Negro
ex-slave. It is a corruption of "Gebel-Tarik" or "The Moutain of
Tarik." Tarik, who was a Moor, captured the Rock which was then
called Calpe, in 711 AD. Later he counquered Southern Spain. Tarik's
countrymen thereafter ruled Spain for 700 years.
75. Abraham Hannibal,
captured as a slave in Africa, was adopted by Peter the Great as his
son and taught military engineering. Later hannibal became tutor to
the heir to the throne, and commander-in-chief of the Russian army.
He died in 1782 at the age of 90, owning vast estates and 2000 white
slaves.
76. Toussaint
L'Ouverture and his great mulatto rival, General Rigaud, were both
thrown into the same dungeon in France by Napoleon in 1802. Later at
St. Helena, Napoleon declared that the imprisonment of Toussaint was
a grave political error.
77. Toussaint
L'Ouverture had planned after Haiti was freed to go to Dahomey, West
Africa, and use it as a base from which to fight the slave-trade.
For this purpose he saved 6,000,000 gold francs, equivalent to that
sum in dollars now, which he entrusted to Stephen Girard,a n
American ship captain. After the treacherous capture of Toussaint,
Girard would not turn over the money to Toussaint's family. During
his nine months imprisonment Toussaint was tormented by Napoleon's
agents to reveal the hiding-place of the money. Later Girard, a
Frenchman by birth, became the richest American of his day. He left
millions on his death in 1831 for the founding of Girard College in
Philadelphia, stipulating that it should be for whites only. He also
gave money to buy coal for the poor of Philadelphia with the same
provision.
78. Jean Francois,
leader of the Haitian blacks in 1791, an ex-slave and once superior
officer of Toussaint L'Ouverture, rose to be a granfee of Spain.
This gave him the privilege of calling the king of Spain "cousin"
and wearing his hat in the royal presence. He was a favorite at the
Court at Madrid.
79. Napoleon had twelve
West Indian Negro generals,w hos erved in France, namely: General
Alexander Dumas, once Napoleon's superior officer; Andre Rigard;
Martial Besse; B. Leveille; Antoine Cloualatte; J.B. Belley;
Magloire Pelage; Alex. Petion; A. Chanlatte; Barthelmy; Villate; and
Etienne V. Mentor.
80. Mohammed Ahmed,
called the Mahdi, an ex-waiter of the Sudan, defeated every army
that England sent against him, one of which was 11,000 strong. At
his death in 1885, he had carved out for himself an empire in
africa, 1600 miles long and 700 miles wide. Among those killed by
the Mahdi was the famous English General, "Chinese"
Gordon.
81. One of the most
daring leaders of the Filipinos against the American troops in the
Philippines in 1899 was an American Negro deserter, named Fagan. A
short story based on his life by Rowland Thomas, noted American
writer, won first prize of $10,000 in a nation-wide contest in
1914.
82. General A. Dodds, a
Senegalese,was France's best known soldier, prior to the first World
War. In 1901, as the senior general, he commanded for a brief time
the Allied Army -- White Americans, german, British, French, and
Japanese -- against the Boxers in China. The Germans, unable to
tolerate that, hurriedly sent out a field-marshal.
83. Captain of the Navy
S.H. Mortenol, an unmixed Negro, commanded the Air Defenses of Paris
from 1916-1918, with 205 planes and 10,000 white men under him. It
was he who located and destroyed the Big Berthas that used to
bombard Paris from a distance of sixty to eighty miles.
84. The leader of the
last successful Cuban revolt in 1933 was Fulgencio Batista, a Negro
sergeant from Oriente Province, who was later President of the
Republic.
Warfare - Men
85. The United States
has had seven big wars, exclusive of Indian ones. The Negro has
distinguished himself in all of them. In the alst war, France
awarded teh Croix de Guerre to four whole Negro regiments, the
369th, 370th, 371st and 372nd, as well as to the first battalion of
the 367th. Sixty Negro officers and 350 non-conmissioned officiers
and men were decorated for valor. Forty-one Negroes have recieved
the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery.
86. In the American
Civil War, the Negro played a role similar to that of America in the
last World War. That is, both provided a balance of power that
brought victory to one side. Without the aid of the Negro, there
might have been no United States now. Abraham Lincoln said four
times that without the Negro it would be "impossible" for the North
to win. This statement is all the more striking since Lincoln, in
response to popular prejudice, stedfastly refused at first to employ
Negro troops through the South was doing so. Instead, he wanted to
ship the Negroes away and in 1862 had Congress to vote $600,000 to
send the first installment to the Ile de vache in Haiti. The colony
ended in disastrous failure and Lincoln sent a ship for the
surviving Negro deportees.
87. 178,975 Negro
soldiers fought in the Union Army between 1861-1865. there were 161
Negro regiments as follows: 141 infantry; 7 cavalry; 12 heavy
artillery; and 1 light artillery. The total number of Negroes aiding
the Union amry was perhaps twice that number.
88. The number of free
Negroes in the United States,w ho fought to perpetuate slavery in
not exactly know, but there must have been thousands. In June, 1861,
Tennessee began to recruit Negroes between the ages of 18 and 50.
South Carolina did the same in 1862.In a review of 28,000
Confederate troops held at New Orleans on November 23, 1861, seven
months after the outbreak of war, there was one regiment of 1400
free Negroes. Preston Roberts, a Negro, was unofficial quartermaster
of General Nathaniel Forrest. He was given the Cross of Honor, the
highest Confederate medal and until his death in 1910 was treated in
all respects like a white man in the south.
89. The national hero of
Buenos Aires, now the City of Buenos Aires, was Antonio Ruiz (El
Negro Falucho), who died rather than let the rebels pull down the
flag of Buenos Aires and hoist that of Spain on the night of
February 3, 1810. a magnificient monument stands to his honor in
that city.
90. The first two
Americans to be decorated by France in the first World War were
Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, both Negroes. Johnson killed four
Germans and wounded twenty-eight others single-handed.
Miscellaneous
91. The most ancient
names for so-called black people are Nehesu, or Nubian; Ethiopian,
and Moor from Ancient Egypt,a nd Negro or Nigrita from West Africa.
All the above are native African words. "Negro" is probably the
oldest as the Negritos are the oldest known branch of the human
race. "Negro" comes from the River Niger. "Niger" found its way into
Latin and since the people from that region were dark-skinned,
Niger, nigra, nigrum came to mean black. Negro, Negrito, Nigrita,
means "the people of the great river." Black and colored, like
white, are, on the other hand, European words. Ethiopian and Moor
were popularly used to describe the so-called blacks until 1500.
Shakespeare uses "Negro" only once and uses it synonymously with
Moor. Africa comes from the ancient Egyptian "Af-rui-ka" or Kafrica,
the land of the Kaffir.
92. The English word,
"admiral" and the French equivalent, "amiral" were adopted as the
result of the great admiration held for the Negroid sea-rovers who
used to scour the coasts of Europe for slaves as last as the 19th
Century. It comes from Amir-al-Bahr (Lord of the Seas), the
commander of the sea-rovers. The principle port of the latter was
Salee, Morocco. A United States squadron, under Commander Decatur,
went to Africa to free the white Americanns held there as
slaves.
93. Ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II
had a Negro "uncle" by adoption. His grandfather, Wilhelm I, adopted
a Negro boy given him by an African explorer, as his son. henri
Noel, as he was called, grew up in the royal palace, and was an
officer in the Germany army.
94. The chief
Back-to-Africe leaders were: Paul Cuffee, Major Martin R. Delany,
African explorer; "Pop" Singleton; William Ellis; Chief Sam; Dr.
Thorne; and Marcus Garvey. The last-named had a following much
greater than the rest combined.
95. Tony Simpson, a
humble Lousiana Negro, posing as Prince Antonio Apache of Arizona,
became the social lion of the elite of New York and Philadelphia in
1903. Among those who feted him in their drawing rooms or in the
Golden Horse-Show at the Metropolitan Opera were Mrs. John Jacob
Astor, Mrs. Howard Gould,a nd Mrs. John R. Drexel. Even President
Theodore Roosevelt was taken in. The latter consulted "Prince
Apache" several times on Indian affairs at the White House. The
"Prince" was tall and imposing, dressed like a Beau Brummel, and had
the manners of a Chesterfield. He used to wear a wig attached to a
tuft of his own wooly hair.
96. After his famous
speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, Booker T. washington
refused an offer of $50,000 for a series of lectures, because it
would interrupt his work at Tuskegee, which was bringing him much
less.
97. Haywood Sheperd, a
free Negro, was the first person killed by John Brown's party of
white and Negro raiders at Harper's Ferry in their efforts to free
the slaves in 1859. Shepherd, while running off to arouse the white
people, was shot dead in his tracks.
98. The black, like the
whites, have been struggling for thousnads of years to change their
hair from it natural form. Negroes arranged their hair with hot
irons in Egypt more than 5,000 years ago.
99. An American Negro
has twenty chances to a white American's one of reaching a hundred
years and over.
100. Since 1460 AD or
earlier, the Negroes of Seville, Spain, had been wearing in the
religious procession on the feast of Corpus Christi, a white robe
and hood, strikingly like that used by the Ku Klux Klan, which
orginated 428 years
later