Showing results by narrator "Rodney Louis Tompkins" in All Categories

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was an orator of Black Nationalism, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. He advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global movement, known as Garveyism. This book, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) was compiled by his wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, mainly from his speeches. Promoting unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and encouraged the political unification of the continent.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was an English playwright, poet, translator, and fiction writer from the Restoration era. Oroonoko (1688) is a unique early example of the novel genre. It employs a first-person narrative from a female perspective and addresses some of the controversial political, economic, and social issues of the time. The injustices of the slave trade are exposed through the author’s graphic account of the cruel realities of life in the English colonies.

The Moors in Spain is an overview of the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Stanley Edward Lane-Poole (1854 - 1931), the author, was a noted British archaeologist.

First published in 1907, My Life as an Indian is the memoir of James Willard Schultz and tells the story of his first year living with the Pikuni tribe in Montana. It includes accounts of religious customs and ceremonies, hunting, raids, food preparation, child-rearing and more, and is thus of great interest to anthropologists and students of Native American history.

John Newton was the master of a slave ship, later becoming a beloved Anglican priest and an ardent abolitionist. His conversion to Christianity began in 1748, and in 1764 he was accepted in the priesthood. However, it took him a while to denounce the slave trade as the pamphlet "Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade" was only published in 1787. Its impact was immediate and it became quite influential. Graphically describing the horrors of the slave trade, the publication is a moving confession of repentance for the author’s part in the hideous trade in human beings.

In his 1920 book The Jews of Africa, Mendelssohn attempts to chart the separate and progressive histories of the Jews in the different parts of Africa where they lived since their expulsion from the land by the Romans. He succeeds in compiling a narrative of a large part of the histories of the Jews of Africa during the centuries following the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem.

The autobiography of Louis Hughes serves as a window on the daily lives of slaves before and during the Civil War. Born into slavery near Charlottesville, Virginia in 1832, the narrative charts his life through Pontotoc, Mississippi to Memphis where he met his wife Matilda Morgan, to Tombigbee, Alabama and escape from slavery in Mississippi in 1865. Hughes provides unique historical insight into slavery in the Confederacy during the Civil War and concludes with the family living as free people in Milwaukee.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (1887-1940) was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) is a collection of his speeches, setting out his vision of a united Africa. As an early proponent of the Back-to-Africa movement, he encouraged a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora. Garvey deplored the view of poverty as a virtue and encourages Blacks to be empowered in every sphere of their lives.

Robinson, one of 12 children of a slave family, grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and this account encompasses his life story from his earliest childhood recollections to his position as minister in the 1890s. The audiobook contains poignant descriptions of the resilience of slaves under the inhumanity of slaveholders.

The Rev. Calvin Dill Wilson (1857-1946) was an author and Presbyterian minister. In Black Masters of 1904, he discusses the little-known history of the free African-Americans that bought and sold slaves just like Southern white planters. Free colored men and women could own their families and in this way protect them against oppressive local laws. There was also the desire to attain a position of superiority over other blacks, an ambition to rise to the class of the masters and to be on the same level as white men.

Reverend Richard A. Morrisey (born 1858) was an African-American biblical scholar, a Doctor of Divinity, and the pastor of a number of churches in the South and in Pennsylvania. In 1915, he published Bible History of the Negro, with the hope of inspiring a greater desire to read the Bible which he describes as giving "the Negro a place among the foremost races of the world, in wealth, in education, in honor and in religion, a history to which every member of the race may point with great pride and profound gratitude to Almighty God today”.

Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835 - 1923) was an African American clergyman and editor. He served as a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1886, and founded The Christian Recorder, an important early African American newspaper. In The Negro in Holy Writ, published in 1900, Tanner shows that the African people are described in the Bible. He argues that the ancient Cushim were the ancient Ethiopians, and that they were Negroes. The book provides evidence for the unity of all mankind.

Rufus L. Perry was an educator and Baptist minister from Brooklyn, New York. He was a member of the African Civilization Society and was a co-founder of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. The Cushite is a short work that investigates the history of ancient peoples.

Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and author. He was one of the first three black people admitted to Harvard Medical School. Delany dreamed of establishing a settlement in West Africa and visited Liberia, a United States colony founded by the American Colonization Society. He was a prolific writer, and his book The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry, Its Introduction Into the United States, and Legitimacy Among Colored Men was published 1853.

Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) was a Welsh explorer and journalist. Famous for his meeting with the missionary and explorer David Livingstone, Stanley searched for the source of the Nile as an agent of King Leopold II of Belgium. In Origin of the Negro Race, he attempts an ethnographic description of the continent’s people beginning with Egypt and the North.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to multiple presidents of the United States. Washington came from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. Character Building (1902) is a collection of talks on self-development given to students and faculty at the Tuskegee Institute, of which he was leader. The author stresses the importance of developing oneself for life-long success.

Twelve Years a Slave is the 1853 narrative of former slave Solomon Northup. He was born free in New York and kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was famously adapted for film in 2013.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass covers the life of the prominent abolitionist during and after the Civil War. Here, Douglass provides a fuller account of his escape from slavery and the underground railway to freedom. It includes his recollections of presidents Garfield and Lincoln, Johnson and Garfield, and an account of his service as Marshall of the District of Columbia.

Born a slave, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) escaped to the North where he became a prominent abolitionist, historian, novelist and playwright. His 1863 book The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements portrays the lives of individuals selected by Brown that had “by their own genius, capacity, and intellectual development, surmounted the many obstacles which slavery and prejudice have thrown in their way, and raised themselves to positions of honor and influence."

In 1802, Richard Drake (1790-1857) at the age of 12, joined his uncle on a slaving voyage between Benin and Brazil. It was the beginning of his 50 years’ career as a slave trader. Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, published posthumously in 1860, tells his stories including those of journeys to the interior of Africa, slave hunts, gold prospecting in West Africa, his capture by an African tribe, lion hunting, marriage to an African woman, visits with African rulers, slave markets, and the West Indies trade.