http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/film/transcripts/garland.html

Interviewer: Talk about the influence of J.A. Rogers.

Phyl Garland: J.A. Rogers probably had one of the biggest classrooms in the country because he taught people like me about black history when you could not find a book about black history in your local library and when nothing was taught in the schools. He, ah, not only wrote a column, "Your History", where he -- he was self-taught, we have to remember -- he came out with some astounding truths. Everybody was black. Beethoven had black blood and Napoleon might have had black blood and if he didn't have it, Josephine certainly did. And about the Pyramids being built because all the Egyptians we'd seen in the movies were white. Ah, later on we found that several of the things that J.A. Rogers had come up with were, ah, validated by other historians. He also used to produce a little cartoon called "Your History" and, ah, an artist named Sammy Mallay did the visuals but Rogers would have these little nuggets of information about black history and Tom Bethune, blind Tom Bethune, the piano progidy (sic) -- prodigy, the first time I heard about Blind Tom was reading J.A. Rogers. And it gave us a lift. It was somethin' we couldn't find in school and we couldn't find in the library. And he might have been self-taught, but he was a man who had a mission and I think he carried it out very well. Ah, he wrote a number of books. Some of them might have duplicated others ...