World's Great Men of Color, Volume I Quotes

“When Egyptian civilization crossed the Mediterranean to become the foundation of Greek culture, the teachings of Imhotep were also absorbed there. But as the Greeks were wont to assert that they were the originators of everything, Imhotep was forgotten for thousands of years and Hippocrates, a legendary figure who lived 2000 years after him, became known as the Father of Medicine.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans emerged and began to extend themselves into the broader world of Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they went on to colonize most of mankind. Later they would colonize world scholarship, mainly the writing of history. History was then written or rewritten to show or imply that Europeans were the only creators of what could be called a civilization. In order to accomplish this, the Europeans had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they previously knew about Africa.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“anthropologists, while pretending to scorn the biblical story of the origin of man and his distribution over the earth, continue to use such terms as “Hamitic” for the Ethiopians and “Semitic” for the Jews. These terms, if they have any meaning at all, designate only language groups, precisely as Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Arab. It is as nonsensical to talk of a Jewish race as it is to talk of a Christian one.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“For a period of more than a hundred years African warrior nationalists, mostly kings, who had never worn a store-bought shoe or heard of a military school, out-maneuvered and out-generaled some of the finest military minds of Europe.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“It would be a greater pity to prostitute lessons of wisdom to rascals incapable of understanding and appreciating them; there is no file that can clean iron of its rust after the rust has eaten through.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“Jim Crow and upright Christian living are held to be indivisible by millions of whites, especially in the United States and the British colonies and dominions.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“slavemasters and kidnappers had indeed done their work well. They had so incorporated their iniquities with the Christian religion that when you doubted their racism you were contradicting the Bible and flying in the face of God Almighty.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans emerged and began to extend themselves into the broader world of Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they went on to colonize most of mankind. Later they would colonize world scholarship, mainly the writing of history. History was then written or rewritten to show or imply that Europeans were the only creators of what could be called a civilization.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“The significance of African history is shown, though not overtly, in the very effort to deny anything worthy of the name of history to Africa and the African peoples.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I