"Joe Augustus Rogers"(September 6,1883-March 26,1966)

Was a Jamaican-American author,journalists,and historian who contributed to the history of  Africa and the African Diaspora,especially the history of African Americans in the United States.His research spanned the academic fields of history,sociology and anthropology .He challenged prevailing the ideas about the race,demonstrated the connections between civilizations ,and traced African achievements.He was of the greatest popularizers of African history in the 20th century.
He was born in Negril,Jamaica.One of eleven children, Joe was the son of  mixed-race parents
who were a minister and schoolteacher.He would later use his light complexion to his advantage,to allow him entrance into places that,at the time,a darker skinned black man was not allowed.His parents were able to afford to give him and his ten siblings only a rudimentary education,but stressed the importance of learning.Joe himself  claimed to have a "good basic education." Some
sources have implied that he became an autodidact later in life.Joe emigrated from to the United States in 1906,where he settled in Harlem,New York.There he lived most of his life.He was there during the Harlem Renaissance,a flowering of African-American artistic an intellectual life in numerous fields.Joe became a close personal friend of the Harlem-based intellectual and activists Hubert Harrison.
While living in Chicago for a time in the 1920s,Joe worked as a Pullman Porter and as reporter for the Chicago Enterprise.His job of Pullman porter allowed him to travel and observe a wide range range of people.Through this travel,Joe 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.
His first book From "Superman" to Man, self-published in 1917,attacked notions of African inferiority.From "Superman" to Man is a polemic against the ignorance that fuels racism.The central plot revolves around a debate between a Pullman porter a white racist Southern politician.
Joe used this debate to air many of his personal philosophies
and debunk steretypes about African Americans and white racial superiority.The porter's arguments and theories are pulled from the plethora of souraces,classical and contemporary,and
run the gamut from history and anthropology to biology.Many of these ideas that permeated Joe later work can been seen germinating in From "Superman"to Man.Joe addresses issues suck as the lack of scientific support for the idea race,the lack of African-American history being told from
an African perspective,and the fact of intermarriage unions among peoples throughout history.Joe criticized African American unquesting embracement of Christiantly,he had many good things to say about Islam and how it uplifited people regardless of their race or social background.In the 1920s,Joe worked as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise.He was a sub-editor of Marcus Garvey's short lived Daily Negro Times.As a newspaper correspondent,he covered such events as the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia for the New York Amsterdam News.He wrote a variety for a variety of African American newspapers and journals:
Crisis,American Mercury,The Messenger Magazine,the Negro World and Survey Graphic.One of his interviews was with Marcus Garvey in prison (New York Amsterdam News,November 17,1926).
Joe served as the only African American US war correspondent during World War II.
Joe also contributed the writing to a syndicated newspaper cartoon featured titled Your Story.
Patterned after the look of  Robert Ripley's popular Believe it or Not cartoons,
Multiple vignettes in each cartoon episode recounted short items from Joe's research.The feature began in the Pittsburgh Courier in November 1934,with art by George L.Lee. In 1940,the art chores were handed over to Samuel Miali,who stayed with the feature through the rest of its run.In 1962,the title was changed to Facts About The Negro.The feature outlived its author,and continued appealing regularly until 1971,presumadly in reprints at the end of the run.Two collections were published,Your History in 1940 and Facts About
The Negro 1960.Joe work was concerned with "the Great Black Man" theory of history.This theory presented history,specifically African American history,as a mural of achievements by prominent African Americans.Joe devoted a significant amount of his professional life to unearthing facts about people of African ancestry.Joe intended these findings to be a refutation of contemporary racist beliefs about about the inferiority of African Americans.Books such as 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro,Sex & Race,World's Great Men of Color,all described remarkable African Americans throughout the ages and cited significant achievements of African Americans.
Joe commented on the partial African American ancestry of some prominent Europeans,including Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas,pere.Similarly,Joe was among those who
asserted that a direct ancestor of the British royal family,Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Stelitz,had a remote ancestor who was of African orgin.
Joe theories about race,sex and color can be found in the books Nature Knows No Color-Line,World's Great Men of Color and the pamphlet Five Negro Presidents,all of which
deal with the ideas of race,sex and color.In the latter,he provided what he said was evidence that there had been 19th and 20th-century presidents of the United States who had
partial African American ancestry.His research in this book inspired Auset Bakhuffu's 1993 book
Six Black presidents: Black Blood: White Masks USA.