100 Amazing Facts About the Negro

July 10, 2017
Harvard professor Gates (Life upon These Shores) leads readers on a broad and inviting tour of black history with this compendium modeled after journalist Joel Rogers’s 1957 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro. Gates’s version, an outgrowth of his writings published on the website the Root, consists of 100 brief essays written in a question-and-answer format on such wide ranging topics as “Who was the first black person to see the baby Jesus?”; “Who were the black passengers on the doomed Titanic voyage?”; and “What happened to Argentina’s black population?” Illustrated with one image per entry, the collection is peppered with information about little-known events in far-away places (such as Argentina, France, and Iraq) and far-removed times (the oldest entry covers ancient Greece). The work is particularly rich in 19th-century American history, with entries on Richard Potter, the first American ventriloquist; Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped slavery in Virginia in 1849 by shipping himself to Philadelphia in a cargo box; and on the raid on Harpers Ferry and the Colfax Massacre. Gates’s book is aimed at readers with limited knowledge of African-American history rather than scholars, and its tendencies toward exaggeration, titillation, irony, and debunking make for an easy romp, with enough obscure tidbits to entertain and inform specialists as well. Illus.

Gates provides an updated version of the 1957 edition of this book, clarifying, updating, and enhancing it, as well as replacing some of the invalid information. Narrator Dominic Hoffman's deep and raspy voice serves as the perfect voice to capture Gates's writing. The importance of African-American communities to our nation (and for the world at large) comes across in the Hoffman's voice--he vocally communicates the gravitas of these figures and moments. From the first Africans to come to the Americas to hallmark moments by African-Americans in science, finance, literature, and political history, Gates recounts a deep and rich history, parts of which are still ignored even today. L.E. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine