Joel
Rogers was born in Negril, Jamaica in about 1880. He moved to the
United States in 1906 and found work as a train porter in Chicago.
Rogers moved to to New York and began contributing to The
Messenger, Crisis and
The Amsterdam News.
Rogers later worked for the Pittsburgh Courier.
This included reporting the Ethiopian-Italian war in 1935. He wrote
several books on African American civil rights including Superman
to Man (1941), Sex and Race
(1944) and Great Men of Color
(1975).
(1) Joel Rogers, Sex and
Race (1944)
The
fight both for and against slavery in the United States was waged
first along scriptural lines. There was also the theory of the descent
from Ham which attained great vogue and still does in certain quarters.
With the superseding of religion by science the battle of inequality
shifted from a scriptural wording to a scientific one. Now it was
no longer what "God had said" but what color, hair, and
skull showed. In other words, the pro-slavery faction and the antislavery
one had entered the stage in new costumes. Underneath were the same
bodies.
(2) Joel Rogers was a close
friend of Hubert Harrison and wrote
about him in World's Great Men of Color (1975)
He spoke wherever an audience
could be had on subjects embracing general literature, sociology,
Negro history, and the leading events of the day. He wrote for such
radical and antireligious periodicals as The Call, The Truth
Seeker, and The Modern Quarterly, being perhaps the first
Negro of ability to enter this field. His views on religion and birth
control were often opposed by Catholics and Protestants alike, and
at his open-air meetings he and his friends were obliged to defend
themselves physically from mobs at times. But he fought back courageously,
never hesitating to speak no matter how great the hostility of his
opponents.
One of the men who was very much influenced by Harrison was Marcus
Garvey, later the most prominent of Negro agitators. Garvey's emphasis
on racialism was due in no small measure to Harrison's lectures on
Negro history and his utterances on racial pride, which animated and
fortified Garvey's views. Harrison's slogan became "Race First,"
in opposition to his earlier socialistic one of "Class First."
Harrison's views profoundly influenced the
Messenger Group, headed by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, two
leaders who did more than anyone else to focus the attention of the
government and of thinking whites on the injustices suffered by Negroes
during the war. While the old leaders capitulated and urged the members
of the race to submit while the war was on, these two brilliant young
men spoke out fearlessly.
(3) William
Du Bois, The World and Africa (1947)
I have learned much from Joel Rogers. Rogers is an untrained American
Negro writer who has done his work under great difficulty without
funds and at much personal sacrifice. But no man living has revealed
so many important facts about the Negro race as has Rogers. His mistakes
are many and his background narrow, but he is a true historical student.
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