THE LIFE AND TIMES OF J. A. ROGERS 1880 - 1966

"Rogers came from Jamaica in the West Indies. He settled in Chicago. He eventually took a job as a Pullman porter so he could visit different cities and libraries and do research. … in a lot of large cities a lot of libraries were for whites only. Black people weren't permitted to go into them. So Rogers had to pay the Pullman conductor to go to the libraries and take out books from them. The conductor said, "Rogers, I believe you're a damn fool. But if you want to throw away your money that way, I'm willing to cooperate." (Prof. John Jackson)

He had been told when he was a child in Sunday School that God had cursed the black man and made him inferior. Rogers wanted to prove that the black man was not inferior…

J. A. Rogers is the most interesting and dynamic black historian and social commentator of modern times. He spent over fifty years writing, researching and publishing the contribution and inter-connection of black people to world history. Between the 1920s and the 1960s Rogers single-handedly, through his newspaper columns and publications, made black history a subject of popular interest in America for the first time.

He taught himself French, German, Spanish and Italian and travelled extensively around the world in search of facts, pictures and artefacts with no foundational support. A prodigious and meticulous detective, Rogers undertook massive, primary research into the global history of African people. However in America he was seen as a controversial figure by both black and white academics for his research on the delicate issue of race and sex. He sought to identify the historical intermixing of black and white people and to promote black identity through particular biographical achievements.

Part of his own personal struggle was dealing with his own mixed parentage, identity and skin colour. His fifty years spent writing about black history were integral to his personal, coming-to-terms with the issues of racial identity, race mixing and self-esteem. He firmly believed that intermixing was essential for the survival of the human race and that no one racial group was superior to the other.

JA Rogers' life experiences spanned the pivotal events of black history in the 20th century and it is against the backdrop of these events that his life comes into relief: born in Jamaica in 1880 as slavery was just coming to an end in Brazil, Rogers moved to Chicago and then to New York where he became actively involved in the 'Harlem Renaissance' of the 1920s.

Rogers had known Marcus Garvey from their youth in Jamaica and in 1923, he covered the Marcus Garvey trial. Although never a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, of which Garvey was founder and President-General, Rogers wrote regularly for the UNIA's weekly newspaper, the Negro World, and lectured to local UNIA chapters.

In 1935, dissatisfied with the mainstream reporting of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Rogers became the first black war correspondent when he reported on Mussolini's campaign for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper. After returning to the United States in 1936 he published a highly popular, illustrated pamphlet entitled The Real Facts About Ethiopia.

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