100 Amazing Facts About the Negro [Hardcover]

CNHENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-one books and created seventeen documentary films, includingWonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, Black American Since MLK: And Still I Rise,andFinding Your Roots,whose fourth season in currently in production with PBS. His six-part PBS documentary,The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross—which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted—earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program–Long Form, as well as a Peabody Award, and Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, and an NAACP Image Award. Gate’s latest film is the six-hour PBS documentaryAfrica’s Great Civilizations.1

Which journalist was among the first to bring black history facts to the masses?
 
 
For black families in the middle of the twentieth century, “Mr. Rog­ers” was a columnist for the legendaryPittsburgh Courier,and his pithy and always intriguing tidbits of African and African-American history armed them with facts about the black experience that seemed more like fantasies. Since students weren’t being taught anything about black people at school, Joel A. Rogers was just about the only source of black history that a few generations had.
 
The first edition of his now legendary100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof,published in 1957, was billed as “A Negro ‘Believe It or Not,’ ” signifying on Robert Ripley’s brain-bending series that had pre­miered in theNew York Globein October 1919. Rogers’s littllÓ!