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Forefathers

The BLACK ANCESTORS MUSEUM wants to Honor some of the most important Historians who have been the Forefathers of the fighting against the INJUSTICE of this STOLEN LEGACY

“The history of Black Africa will be written in the air until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.”
Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop

Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop

Distinguished historian and Pan-Africanist political leader, Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Diourbel, Senegal on December 23, 1933 to a Muslim Wolof family. Part of the peasant class, his family belonged to the African Mouride Islamic sect. Diop grew up in both Koranic and French colonial schools. Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in Senegal, Diop moved to Paris, where he began his graduate studies at the Sorbonne in 1946 in physics.` ` Once at the Sorbonne, however, Diop became involved in the African students’ anticolonial movement, where young intellectuals worked for African independence. He helped organize the first Pan-African Student Congress in Paris in 1951 and in 1956 participated in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. These movements laid the groundwork for a growing African liberation sentiment, supported by the ideological arguments of Negritude, Marxism, and Pan-Africanism. Committed to the richness of African history, Diop’s 1951 Ph.D. dissertation looked into ancient Egyptian history and the influence it had on European culture. At a time when European cultural superiority was the accepted notion, Diop proclaimed that African civilizations were the inspiration and origin of European accomplishments. The Sorbonne rejected his dissertation, yet his work nevertheless received worldwide attention. In 1955 his work was published as Nations negres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture), a publication that would make him one of the most widely known and controversial historians of his era. Partly due to the response to the book, in 1960 Diop was awarded his doctorate by the Sorbonne. That same year, Senegal gained its independence and Diop returned to his home country. In Senegal, Diop was appointed a research fellow at Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) at Dakar University, where he set up a radiocarbon dating laboratory. In 1961 and 1963, he created political opposition parties: Bloc des Masses Sénégalaises and the Front National du Sénégal. These parties opposed the pro-French policies of President Leopold Senghor’s government. The Bloc des Masses was banned in 1963. In response to the dissolution of these parties, Diop founded the Rassemblement National Democratique (RND) in 1976. The RND published the Wolof-language journal, Siggi, of which Diop was the editor. As a renowned scholar and political activist, Diop was appointed professor of ancient history at Dakar University in 1980. Over his career Diop published a number of books including seven which were translated into English. His most famous works were The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974); The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1978), and Towards the 1 https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/diop-cheikh-anta-1923-1986/ African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946-1960 (1978). Diop received the highest award for scientific research from the Institut Cultural Africain in 1982. As a testament to his global effect, Diop was invited to Atlanta, Georgia in 1985, where Mayor Andrew Young proclaimed April 4th “Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop Day.” The many books Diop published in French were all dedicated to African self-empowerment and the reconstruction of a colonially-fragmented identity. Diop had two sons with his wife, Louise Marie Diop Maes. On February 1, 1986, Cheikh Anta Diop died in Dakar at the age of 63.
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Dr. THEOPHILLE OBENGA

Dr. THEOPHILE OBENGA1
Professor Emeritus
Born in Brazzaville, Congo (Central Africa), Théophile Obenga has studied a wide
variety of subjects and has obtained a wide range of degrees. His degrees
include:
● M.A. in Philosophy (University of Bordeaux, France)
● M.Ed. (University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.)
● M.A. in History (University of Paris, Sorbonne)
● Advanced studies in History, Linguistics, and Egyptology (University of
Geneva, Switzerland); in Prehistory (Institut de Paléontologie Humaine,
Paris), and in Linguistics, Philology, and Egyptology (University of Paris,
Sorbonne, and College de France)
Théophile Obenga holds a Ph.D. in Letters, Arts, and Humanities from Montpellier
University, France. He is a member of the French Association of Egyptologists
(Société Française D’Egyptologie) and of the African Society of Culture (Présence
Africaine). He contributed as part of the United Nations Educational and Scientific
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program, to the writing of the General History of
Africa and the Scientific and Cultural History of Humanity. He was, until the end of
1991, Director General of the Centre International des Civilisations Bantu
(CICIBA) in Libreville, Gabon. He is the Director and Chief Editor of the journal
Ankh.
From January 28 to February 3, 1974, at Cairo, Egypt, Théophile Obenga
accompanied Cheikh Anta Diop as Africa’s representative to the UNESCO
symposium on “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the
Meroitic Script.” This meeting remains one of the single most important and
famous defenses of African intellectual and historical integrity in the modern era.
Dr. Obenga’s most recent work is African Philosophy: the Pharaonic period
2780-330 B.C. Dr. Obenga retired from San Francisco State in 2009

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GEORGES G. M. JAMES

George James was a professor at a small black college in Arkansas during the
1950s when he wrote this book. Originally from Guyana, he was an intellectual
who studied African and European classics. He soon realized something was
wrong with the way the history of philosophy had been documented by Western
scholars. Their biggest mistake, according to James, was they had assumed
philosophy had started with the Greeks.
Professor James had found that philosophy was almost entirely from ancient
Egypt and that the records of this had not only been distorted but, in many cases,
deliberately falsified. He concluded that there was no such thing as Greek
philosophy because it was stolen from the Egyptians. As a result, this was one of
the first books to be banned from colleges and universities throughout North
America. Although opponents have eventually found some flaws, it remains a
groundbreaking book to this day. Even the famous Greek historian from the 5th
century, Herodotus, admitted that the Greeks had borrowed many important ideas
and concepts from the Egyptians.
These ideas covered not just philosophy, but also medicine, architecture, politics,
and more. The purpose of this book is to restore the truth about African
contributions to higher thought and culture. George G. M. James was born in
Georgetown, British Guiana. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and
taught at several American universities including Arkansas A. & M. University.
History & Surveys - Ancient & Classical Ancient - Greece Ancient - Egypt

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Dr. IVAN VAN SERTIMA

Throughout his career as a scholar and author, Ivan Van Sertima worked to transform the way people viewed and taught African history. Van Sertima was born on January 26, 1935, in Kitty Village, Guyana when it was still a British colony. After completing high school, he worked as a Press and Broadcasting Officer for Guyana Information Services. In the late 1960s, Van Sertima did weekly broadcasts to Africa and the Caribbean as a journalist. In 1964, Van Sertima married Maria Nagy and together they adopted two boys. He then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, graduating in 1969 as an honor student with a Bachelor of Arts in African languages and literature. In 1970, Van Sertima began his graduate work at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After his divorce from Maria, he married Jacqueline Pattern in 1984 and gained two stepdaughters. Van Sertima began publishing before he came to the United States. In 1967, he published a dictionary of Swahili legal terms. While earning his graduate degree, he published his most famous work, They Came Before Columbus, in 1976. The book introduced his argument that people of African origin came to Central and South America long before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. The book achieved widespread attention in the African American community and gave a different insight into African history. In 1977, Van Sertima received his master’s degree and became an Associate Professor of African Studies at Rutgers in 1979. In the same year he founded the Journal of African Civilizations, editing and publishing the journal for decades. The Journal of African Civilizations helped transform how African history was viewed and taught. Its articles described early African advances in agriculture, mathematics, arts, engineering, architecture, writing, medicine, astronomy, and navigation. Van Sertima also discussed many of these topics in his several published books including Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (1983), Black Women in Antiquity (1984), The African Presence in Early Asia (1985), Great Black Leaders, Ancient and Modern (1988), and Egypt: The Child of Africa (1994). His research also discussed the early African civilizations which had disappeared from history. In 1999, Van Sertima republished, in the African Renaissance, earlier essays which discussed the scientific contributions of Africans. He also published critical essays questioning the work of previous historians and authors about the African continent. In 1974 Van Sertima was asked to join UNESCO’s International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind. Furthermore, from 1976 to 1980 he was asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ivan Van Sertima passed away on May 25, 2009, in Highland Park, New Jersey; he was 74. He was survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and his four children.
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Dr. JOHN HENRIK CLARKE

John Henrik Clarke, historian, black nationalist, and Pan-Africanist, was a pioneer in the formation of Africana studies in the United States. Principally a self-trained historian, Clarke dedicated his life to correcting what he argued was the prevailing view that people of Africa and of African decent had no history worthy of study. Over the span of his career Clarke became one of the most respected historians of African and African American history. Clarke was born on New Year’s Day, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama. He described his father as a “brooding, landless sharecropper,” who struggled to earn enough money to purchase his own farm, and his mother as a domestic. Clarke’s mother Willie Ella (Mays) Clarke died in 1922, when he was about seven years old. In 1932 Clarke left the South at age eighteen and he traveled by boxcar to Chicago, Illinois. He then migrated to New York City, New York where he came under the tutelage of noted scholar Arthur A. Schomburg. While in New York City’s Harlem, Clarke undertook the study of Africa, studying its history while working full time. In 1949 the New School for Social Research asked Clarke to teach courses in a newly created African Studies Center. Nineteen years later Clarke founded the African Heritage Studies Association in 1968, and was principally responsible for the creation of the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College in New York City. He later lectured at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting Professor of African history. Clarke’s numerous works include A New Approach to African History (1967), African People in World History (1993), and The Boy Who Painted Jesus Black (1975). He died in New York City in 1998.
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YOSEF BEN-JOCHANNAN

Yosef Ben-Jochannan was an Afrocentric historian whose work is focused mainly on black presence in ancient Egypt. He contends in his writings that the pharaohs came out of the heart of Africa and that the original Jews were from Ethiopia and were black Africans, and the white Jews adopted the faith and customs later. He has been accused of distorting history, and, since his work contradicts the prevailing view of Egyptian and African history, it is, therefore, controversial. Ben-Jochannan was born an only child to an Ethiopian father and an Afro-Puerto Rican Jewish mother in a Falasha community in Ethiopia. He attended schools in Brazil, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Cuba and earned degrees in engineering and anthropology. He continued his education at the University of Havana, Cuba, where he earned a Master’s degree in architectural engineering. He earned a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology from the same school, and finally, he attended the University of Barcelona, where he earned another doctoral degree, this time in Moorish history. Ben-Jochannan immigrated to the United States in the early 1940s. He was appointed chairman of the African Studies Committee at UNESCO headquarters in 1945. He served in that position until 1970. Ben-Jochannan began teaching Egyptology at Malcolm King College in 1950, and then he taught at City College in New York. He was an adjunct professor at Cornell University from 1976 to 1987. He has also taught at Columbia University, Al-Azan University and Rutgers. He led an archaeological dig in the Nubia region of Egypt in the 1990s and also leads an annual trip of black people to Egypt. Ben-Jochannan is a prolific author, penning 49 books, such as Black Man of the Nile and African Origins of Western Religions. The subject of most of his books is ancient Nile Valley civilizations. He also wrote and co-wrote elementary and secondary school texts in the 1960s. He is the chair of the publishing house Alkebu-Lan Foundation and its subsidiary, Alkebu-Lan Books and Education Materials Associates. He donated his personal library of more than 35,000 volumes to the Nation of Islam in 2002. Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan died in Harlem, New York on March 19, 2015 at the age of 96.
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CHANCELLOR WILLIAMS

Prominent in the pantheon of Afrocentric scholars is Chancellor James Williams, the son of a former slave, born on December 22, 1898, in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Williams earned both his bachelor’s degree in education and master’s degree in history at Howard University where he began teaching in 1946. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at American University in 1949 and did research at Oxford University, the University of London, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and, in 1956, University College in Ghana. Williams is best known for his book The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1971) in which he attempted to repair the reputation of sub-Saharan Africans prior to the conquests of Europeans by pointing out the achievements of African people and the bias of white academics who would distort knowledge of their great past. What is less known about Williams is that long before he penned his history texts he asserted himself as an American writer unfettered by the burden of race. His “flirtation with universality” resulted in what he called a “562-page white life novel,” The Raven which was published in 1943. The novel, based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe, was praised in the New York Times as a work of “extraordinary quality.” Williams’ other books are the nonfiction texts, The Rebirth of African Civilization (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961) and Problems in African History (Washington, D.C.: Pencraft Books, 1965). Williams published a collection of essays titled And If I Were White in 1946 while his “black life” novels, Have You Been to the River? and The Second Agreement With Hell appeared in 1952 and 1979 respectively. Williams worked at several occupations including Census Bureau worker, statistician, restaurateur, high school teacher and principal, baking company president, and newsletter editor. Chancellor James Williams died in Washington, D.C. of respiratory failure on December 7, 1992 at the age of 93.
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Dr. FRANCES CRESS WELSING

Frances Cress Welsing, a psychiatrist best known for writing The Isis Papers, was born Frances Luella Cress in Chicago, Illinois, on March 18, 1935. Welsing, who was the child of physician Henry Cress and teacher Ida Mae Griffen, grew up the middle of three daughters. She received her Bachelor of Science from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and her medical degree (M.D.) from Washington, D.C.’s Howard University in 1962. After earning her M.D., Welsing stayed in Washington, D.C., pursuing a career in child and general psychiatry. Welsing spent nearly twenty-five years working as a staff physician for D.C.’s Department of Human Services, and also as the clinical director of two schools catering to children with emotional troubles. Welsing opened her own private practice in D.C. in 1967. Through her published works and her research, Welsing sought to help bring about a solution to the mental health problems of the black community by understanding racism. Welsing published her first major work, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation” as an essay in 1974 while an assistant professor at Howard University. In the controversial essay, Welsing argued that the drive for white supremacy and superiority stems from a pervasive feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. Welsing claimed that “whiteness” was, in fact, a deficiency, evidenced by the inability of whites and other races to produce melanin which generates skin color. In short, white people in America could not cohabit peacefully with their black peers, according to Welsing, because of a deep-seated jealousy of people with melanin and their embrace of racial supremacy to accommodate these feelings. The essay was controversial and, according to Welsing, prevented her from not only gaining tenure at Howard but in fact losing her teaching post. In 1991 Welsing published her most famous work, a collection of essays titled The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, which discussed in depth the issues of white supremacy and racism in the United States. In The Isis Papers, Welsing delved deeper into her theories of melanin deficiency among whites as the driver of racism, white supremacy, and white segregation. In the process of psychoanalyzing white racism, Welsing also discussed the importance of recognizing racial behaviors and symbols among blacks that were psychologically damaging and which needed to be countered and destroyed. She listed among those behaviors, homosexuality, which she claimed was a strategy for destroying black people. Aside from her published racial and social theories, Welsing was an advocate for a strong African American family unit. She advised black men and women to delay having children until their thirties and instead take the time to thoroughly educate themselves to rear the next generation of high-functioning and disciplined black Americans who could challenge white supremacy. Frances Cress Welsing died in Washington, D.C., on January 2, 2016, after being hospitalized for a stroke. She was eighty years old.
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RANUKO RASHIDI

Runoko Rashidi was an anthropologist and historian with a major focus on what he calls the Global African Presence–that is, Africans outside of Africa before and after enslavement. He was the author or editor of twenty-two books, the most recent of which are My Global Journeys in Search of the African Presence, Assata-Garvey and Me: A Global African Journey for Children in 2017, and The Black Image in Antiquity in 2019. His other works include Black Star: The African Presence in Early Europe, published by Books of Africa in London in November 2011, and African Star over Asia: The Black Presence in the East, published by Books of Africa in London in November 2012 and revised and reprinted in April 2013, Uncovering the African Past: The Ivan Van Sertima Papers, published by Books of Africa in 2015. His other works include The African Presence in Early Asia, co-edited by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. Four of Runoko’s works have been published in French. As a traveler and researcher Dr. Rashidi has visited 124 countries. As a lecturer and presenter, he has spoken in sixty-seven countries. Runoko has worked with and under some of the most distinguished scholars of the past half-century, including Ivan Van Sertima, John Henrik Clarke, Asa G. Hilliard, Edward Scobie, John G. Jackson, Jan Carew, and Yosef ben-Jochannan. In October 1987 Rashidi inaugurated the First All-India Dalit Writer’s Conference in Hyderabad, India. In 1999 he was the major keynote speaker at the International Reunion of the African Family in Latin America in Barlovento, Venezuela. In 2005 Rashidi was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, his first, by the Amen-Ra Theological Seminary in Los Angeles. In August 2010 he was the first keynote speaker at the First Global Black Nationalities Conference in Osogbo, Nigeria. In December 2010 he was President and first speaker at the Diaspora Forum at the FESMAN Conference in Dakar, Senegal. In 2018 he was named Traveling Ambassador to the Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities League RC 2020. In 2020 he was named to the Curatorial and Academic boards of the Pan-African Heritage Museum. As a tour leader he has taken groups to India, Australia, Fiji, Turkey, Jordan, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Togo, Benin, France, Belgium, England, Cote d’Ivoire, Namibia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Peru, Cuba, Luxembourg, Germany, Cameroon, the Netherlands, Spain, Morocco, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. Before his sudden passing, he was doing major research on the African presence in the museums of the world. Runoko Rashidi’s major mission in life is the uplift of African people, those at home and those abroad.
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ANTHONY BROWDER

Anthony T. Browder is an author, publisher, cultural historian, artist, and educational consultant. He is a graduate of Howard and has lectured extensively throughout the United States and five continents. Mr. Browder is the founder and director of IKG Cultural Resources and has devoted 35 years to researching ancient Egyptian history, science, philosophy, and culture. He has traveled to Egypt 52 times since 1980 and is currently director of the ASA Restoration Project, which is funding the excavation and restoration of two 25th dynasty tombs of Kushite noblemen on the west bank of Luxor, Egypt. Browder is the first African American to fund and coordinate an archeological dig in Egypt and has led 20 archeological missions to Egypt since 2009. Mr. Browder’s three decades of study have led him to the conclusion that ancient Africans were the architects of civilization and developed the rudiments of what has become the scientific, religious, and philosophical backbone of mankind. It is from this framework that IKG has concentrated its research and disseminated its findings. He is the author of six publications, including the best sellers, From the Browder File, Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization, and Egypt on the Potomac, and the co-author of four publications, including two written with his daughter, Atlantis Tye Browder. Ms. Browder has accompanied her father on 6 excavation missions in Egypt and they are the first African American, Father-Daughter archeological team in history. Anthony is currently pursuing a degree in Egyptology at the University of Manchester, England, and is an Adjunct Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. All of Mr. Browder’s publications, shown below, are currently used in classrooms around the world.
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The great achievements of this Ancient Black African Civilization are safeguarded in the most important European, American, and Egyptian museums with their own Eurocentric interpretation which is very far from the Historical Truth.

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