"Tanner argues...Solomon had Hamitic blood, Moses married an Ethiopian, and...a black man helped Jesus carry the cross to Calvary." -Moved to Tears (2018)
"Tanner was, indeed, one of the earliest advocates of Africans' prominent presence in the Bible." -Fire in His Heart: Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner and the A.M.E. Church (1998)
"Tanner, a well-educated man...the several works he published entitled him to the distinction of being one of the most scholarly Negroes of his time." Carter Godwin Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (1921)
"One of the brightest, grandest, noblest men in the ranks of Negro Methodism is Dr. B.T. Tanner, the veteran journalist of the colored race." -The College of Life Or Practical Self (1896)
"Tanner urged members everywhere to remain loyal to the church...only Christian truth gave AME adherents true freedom." -African American Lives (2004)
Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner proves that there is no Divine curse resting on the Black race. Not only does argue that Ham was the progenitor of the Black race in his short 18-page 1869 book " The Negro's Origin," he also maintains that the Black race is of high rank in the human development of civilization.
Ham's descendants, including Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, and the Canaanites, built pyramids and Tower of Babel and were responsible for the great accomplishments throughout history. At the same time, he refutes the Curse of Ham notion.
His position is that the Bible is the primary authority on history in general and Black history in particular, as it is an infallible source of information.
Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835 –1923) was an African American clergyman and editor. He served as a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1886, and founded the Christian Recorder an important early African American newspaper and was an editor of the A.M.E. Church Review.
Other works of the author include:
• The Color of Solomon
• The Descent of the Negro
• The Negro in Holy Writ
