Joel A. Rogers
Joel Augustus Rogers was born on this date in 1883. He was a Black writer, lecturer, anthropologist, historian, journalist, and publisher.
Rogers was from Negril, Jamaica, where his father was a small-town schoolteacher. In 1906, Rogers moved to Chicago but spent most of his life in Harlem, New York. Rogers had known Marcus Garvey in Jamaica, and in 1917, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1923, he covered the Marcus Garvey trial, wrote for the Universal Negro Improvement Associations' weekly newspaper, the Negro World, and lectured to local UNIA chapters. Rogers also researched the global history of African people. In 1925, he went to Europe to research and analyze their libraries and museums.
In 1927, he returned to Europe for research and traveled to North Africa during the same period. Between 1935 and 1936, he researched Egypt and Sudan. He worked as a correspondent for the New York Amsterdam News. He attended the coronation of Haile Selassie I, who presented him with the Coronation Medal.
Rogers' organizational affiliations included the Paris Society of Anthropology, the American Geographical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Academy of Political Science.
For 50 years, Rogers investigated and reported the accomplishments of ancient and contemporary African people, contributing to such publications as The Crisis, American Mercury, the Messenger, The Negro World, Pittsburgh Courier, and Survey Graphic. When publishing houses refused to publish his works, Rogers published them himself. His most acclaimed works are "From Superman to Man," his first book, published in 1917; "One-Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro," "The Real Facts About Ethiopia," "Sex and Race," "Nature Knows No Color-Line," and "The World's Great Men of Color."
Rogers was the first Black war correspondent. He became an unparalleled scholar in assembling information about African people and probably did more to popularize African history than any writer of the 20th century. Rogers wrote and published over 16 books and pamphlets covering the entire spectrum of the global African community, from ancient and modern Africa to Asia, Australia, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere.
Joel Augustus Rogers died in 1966.
