Black Folk Here and There, St. Clair Drake, Los Angeles, 1987

Vol. I pages 98-9

….No discussion of comparative race relations would be complete without consideration of the work of the highly motivated, self-trained historian Joel A. Rogers. While Woodson, also the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and Associatcd Publishers, took a doctorate at Harvard, Rogers had only the equivalent of a secondary-school education. Endowed with unusual talent, Rogers advanced from the menial pursuits he first engaged in as an immigrant to the United States from Jamaica to become one of the best-informed individuals in the world on black history, writing and publishing his own books without any kind of organizational or foundation support. Solid scholarship combined with considerable speculation based upon photographic evidence appeared in the interesting and informative three-volume work Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands (vols. 1 and 2 [New York: J. A. Rogers], vol. 3 [New York: H. M. Rogers], 1942—67). Much of the data was presented in a more popular form in Nature Knows No Color-line: Research into the Negro Ancestry of the White Race, 3d ed. (New York: H. M. Rogers, 1952). Two substantial, well-documented volumes constitute World’s Great Men of Color: 3000 B.C. to 1946 A.D., first published privately, but then by Macmillan during the 1960s. One book by Rogers used the format of an argument between a black Pullman porter and a southern senator to present much of the data from his other books, and a small pamphlet, 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, with Complete Proof: A Short-cut to the World History of the Negro, 23d revised and enlarged edition (New York: H. M. Rogers, 1957), made a great deal of his scholarship available in capsule form. A preface to volume one of World’s Great Men of Color, entitled “How and Why This Book Was Written,” not only described the author’s intellectual development and how he decided to write in the vindicationist genre but also revealed a temperate, sophisticated approach to the use of sources, which unfortunately was sometimes not strictly adhered to in his handling of the biographies (as, for example, in the somewhat feeble evidence presented for Beethoven’s “blackness” in comparison with the more scholarly treatment of the evidence about Cleopatra). Whatever the weaknesses of Joel A. Rogers’s work, it merits serious study.

J. A. Rogers’s industriously collected facts constitute an important complement to the work of Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Although Rogers’s books were written for a popular audience, they contain valuable data for students and provide leads for further research. His work stands in sharp contrast to much of the social science literature that attempts to provide Marxian or psychoanalytical explanations, with Rogers advancing what he considers certain “commonsense” explanations of discrimination and segregation. For example, in Nature Knows No Color-line, Rogers simply presented an “opposites attract each other” theory to explain the prevalence of miscegenation.