100 Amazing Facts About The Negro With Complete Proof

100 Amazing Facts About The Negro With Complete Proof

J.A. Rogers

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, gave 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 entire 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.

Fagen, David (1875- ?)

David Fagen was the most celebrated of the handful of African American soldiers who defected to the Filipino revolutionary army led by Emilio Aguinaldo during the Filipino American War of 1899-1902.  Fagen was born in Tampa, Florida around 1875. Details of his life remain sketchy. His father was a merchant and a widower. For a time he worked as a laborer for Hull’s Phosphate Company.

On June 4, 1898 at the age of 23, Fagen enlisted in the Twenty-fourth infantry, one of the four black regiments of that time that was coincidentally based in Tampa. Fagen would see combat a year later as he shipped off from San Francisco to Manila on June 1899. By then, the Filipino American war had been raging for four months, as Filipino patriots sought to defend their newly established Republic which they had won in a revolution against Spain. Fagen was soon in combat against Filipino guerillas in Central Luzon. Reports indicate that he had constant arguments with his commanding officers and requested to be transferred at least three times which contributed to his growing resentment of the army.

On Nov. 17, 1899, Fagen defected to the Filipino army. Winning the trust of the Filipinos he took sanctuary in the guerilla-controlled areas around Mount Arayat in Pampanga province. Fagen served enthusiastically for the next two years in the Filipino cause. His bravery and audacity were much praised by his Filipino comrades. Fagen was promoted from first lieutenant to captain by his commanding officer, General Jose Alejandrino on Sept. 6, 1900. Such was his popularity that Filipino soldiers often referred to him as “General Fagen.” His exploits earned him front page coverage in the New York Times which described him as a “cunning and highly skilled guerilla officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units.”

Clashing at least eight times with American troops from Aug. 30, 1900 to Jan. 17, 1901, Fagen’s most famous action was the daring capture of a steam launch on the Pampanga River. Along with his men, he seized its cargo of guns and swiftly disappeared into the forests before the American cavalry could arrive. White officers were frustrated at their inability to capture Fagen whose exploits by now had begun to take on legendary proportions both among the Filipinos and in the U.S. press. Fagen’s success also triggered the fear of black defections (of which there were actually only twenty).

By 1901, American forces captured key Filipino leaders including Alejandrino and by March, Aguinaldo himself. Filipino leaders tried to secure amnesty for Fagen, but the Americans refused, insisting that he would be court-martialed and most likely executed. Hearing of this, Fagen, by now married to a Filipina, refused to surrender and sought refuge in the mountains of Nueva Ecija in Central Luzon. Branded a “bandit,” Fagen became the object of a relentless manhunt, with a $600 reward for his capture, “dead or alive.” Posters of him in Tagalog and Spanish appeared in every Nueva Ecija town, but he continued to elude capture.
On Dec. 5, 1901, Anastacio Bartolome, a Tagalog hunter, delivered to American authorities the severed head of a “negro” he claimed to be Fagen. While traveling with his hunting party, Bartolome reported that he had spied upon Fagen and his wife accompanied by a group of indigenous people called Aetas bathing in a river. Recognizing him from the wanted posters, the hunters attacked the group and allegedly killed and beheaded Fagen, then buried his body near the river. But this story has never been confirmed and there is no record of Bartolome receiving a reward.  Official army records of the incident refer to it as the “supposed killing of David Fagen,” and several months later, Philippine Constabulary reports still made references to occasional sightings of Fagen.
  
To this day, it remain unclear what exactly became of David Fagen. His life after the war continued to be as mysterious as his existence before it. But his actions, largely forgotten in the United States, continue to be remembered in the Philippines as that of an African American man who heroically cast his lot with the Filipino revolutionaries to resist the injustice of American imperial designs.

Sources:
Michael C. Robinson and Frank N. Schubert, “David Fagen: an Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899-1901,” The Pacific-Historical Review, vol. 44, No. 1, (Feb. 1975), pp.68-83.