J.A. Rogers
FBI Files on J.A. Rogers
- The self-educated J. A. Rogers (1880-1966), one of thousands of Jamaicans who found homes in Harlem in the early twentieth century, became a prolific novelist, cultural critic, and revisionist historian. In From Superman to Man (1917) and other polemics, Rogers attacked the pseudoscientific basis of racism, arguing that both history and biology undercut the assumptions of white racial superiority. “Jazz at Home,” his 1925 contribution to Alain Locke’s Harlem Renaissance-building New Negro anthology, memorably defined the music as “a thing of the jungles—modern man-made jungles.” In World’s Great Men of Color (1947) and its many successors, Rogers offered a prototypical contribution to the “Great Black Men” theory of black history. During World War II, when he regularly contributed to the Pittsburgh Courier, the FBI became suspicious of Rogers’s association with George Schuyler. It thus kept tabs on him from 1942 until the end of his life.