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| ISBN-13: | 9780960229475 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/1952 |
| Edition description: | REVISED |
| Pages: | 71 |
| Sales rank: | 311,214 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
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 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 Museum 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 B. C. and is perhaps older than Egypt or Ethiopia. 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 Ethiopia.
12. Cheops, a Negro, built the Great Pyramid, one 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 B. C.
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 B. C.
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 B. C.
16. Negroes lived in America thousands of years before Columbus. Central American monuments show numerous carving 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 had 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 substantially higher than the ratio of the white men by just five per cent, namely 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 per cent. 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 surprising comparisons. 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 than Mississippi Whites. The Negroes of these seven states are less illiterate by 100 to 400 per cent 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 Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia by from one to seven per cent.
22. Two centuries ago the Negroes of South Africa and the Northern Europeans both practised a form of cannibalism that was strikingly similar. Of the vital organs of slain foes, the Negroes made a muti, or 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, and in most cases they were skinned, the fatty parts were roasted, and the genitals cut off, dried, and 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 Zanibar, 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 dollars 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 Arctic explorer was Pytheas, a Greek, who perished in the attempt in 325 B. C.
SCIENCE AND INVENTION
27. Jan Ernest Matzeliger, a Dutch West Indian Negro living in Lynn, Mass., invented the first machine for sewing the 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 the Roosevelt Medal in 1939 for "distinguished service in the field of science." From the peanut he has extracted 285 products, and 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 at 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 making 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, 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 you realize how much of the original Jew remained in only those seventy Jews after four centuries. Tacitus, Roman historian of 90 A.D., 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 Israel, 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 A. D., and ruled for forty years. The Falashas assert that they are the original Jews. They call themselves "The Beta-Israel," 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 B. C. 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 France (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; Blaise 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.
RACE-MIXING
39. Persina, a Queen of Ethiopia, 60 B. C., presented her husband, Hydaspes, with a light-colored child, "which color is strange among Ethiopians." She declared that 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 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 mule-driver, 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, the 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 loud and long 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 making 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, and 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "100 Amazing Facts About the Negro"
by .
Copyright © 1995 Helga M. Rogers.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Quiz,
100 Amazing Facts,
The Arts,
Ancient Civilizations,
Illiteracy and Intelligence,
Exploration,
Science and Invention,
Jews and Ethiopians,
Medicine,
Politics,
Race-Mixing,
Religion,
Rulers,
Slavery,
Sports,
Warfare — Commanders,
Warfare — Men,
Miscellaneous,
Proof,
Answers to Quiz,
The Arts,
Ancient Civilizations,
Illiteracy and Intelligence,
Exploration,
Science and Invention,
Jews and Ethiopians,
Medicine,
Politics,
Race-Mixing,
Religion,
Rulers,
Slavery,
Sports,
Warfare — Commanders,
Warfare — Men,
Miscellaneous,
List of World's Greatest Men and Women of African Descent,
Other Outstanding Facts of Negro Progress,
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