http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000K38BVW/?tag=2022091-20
1972
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1975882857/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1981792678/?tag=2022091-20
Joel Rogers was born on September 6, 1880 in Jamaica, West Indies, in the family of Samuel and Emily Rogers. His parents could afford to give Rogers and his ten siblings only a rudimentary education, but stressed the importance of learning. After settling in the United States in 1906, he lived in Chicago and then New York City. He became interested in the history of African Americans in this country.
Joel Augustus Rogers is self-educated.
While living in Chicago for a time in the 1920s, Rogers worked as a Pullman porter and as a reporter for the Chicago Enterprise. His job of Pullman porter allowed him to travel and observe a wide range of people. Through this travel, he was able to feed his appetite for knowledge, by using various libraries in the cities which he visited. He self-published the results of his research in several books. Rogers' first book From "Superman" to Man, self-published in 1917, attacked notions of African inferiority.
In the 1920s, Rogers worked as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise. He was a sub-editor of Marcus Garvey's Daily Negro Times. As a newspaper correspondent, Rogers covered such events as the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia for the New York Amsterdam News. He wrote for a variety of other black newspapers and journals: Crisis, American Mercury, The Messenger Magazine, the Negro World and Survey Graphic.
Rogers also served as one of few black US war correspondents during World War II. Rogers also contributed to a syndicated newspaper cartoon feature entitled Your History.
His belief in one race – humanity – precluded the idea of several different ethnic races. In this, he was a humanist. He used history as a tool to bolster his ideas about humanism, and his scholarship to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries.
Quotes from others about the person
...looked at the history of people of African origin, and showed how their history is an inseparable part of the history of mankind.
Joel is married to a woman Helga M. Rogers. His wife continued to re-publish Rogers’ works for some years after his passing.
