When one looks upon our people today it is hard to believe that in 1845, an Illinois State legislative committee concluded that: “By nature, education, and association, it is believed that the Negro is inferior to the white man, physically, morally, and intellectually; whether this be true to the fullest extent, matters not, when we take into consideration the fact that such is the opinion of the vast majority of our citizens.”

It is equally absurd to note that the Greek, Cicero (106-43 BC) said in a letter to his friend Atticus, a millionaire employer of slave labor: “Do not obtain your slaves from Britain, because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form part of the household of Athens.”

One only has to review briefly a history of Great Britain to discover the error in Cicero’s letter. Likewise, a few historical facts are sufficient to lead one to seriously question the accuracy of the Illinois State legislature’s conclusion, either then or now.

Some 400 years before Alexander the Great inherited the throne from his father, Philip of Macedonia (336 BC), and about 1,818 years before William of Orange crossed the channel and conquered England (1066 AD), our people had conquered and were the masters of what was then the world’s greatest empire — Egypt.

Some 600 years before the Romans invaded England and attacked the Celtic “barbarians” of Britain (43 AD), our people had established iron smelting facilities at Meroe that were the envy of the then known world.

In 1493, a year after Columbus discovered America, King Aska of the Songhay controlled an empire larger than the whole of Europe. It had banking and credit systems, and schools at Gao, Walata, Jenne, and Timbuktu. Christian, Jewish, and Moslem youth came to study such subjects as law, surgery, and history.

Indeed, when the first white man arrived in Africa in 1444, he found not the Celtic barbarians Julius Caesar found in 45 BC on his first trip to what became Britain, but a major kingdom about whose king Alexander Chamberlain said, “King Askia . . . was certainly the equal of the average European monarch of the time and superior to many of them.”

It is not in the self-serving interest of a few so-called historians who have warped the minds of the civilized world by overlooking the people from whom human kind derived, but in a diligent search that truth is found. Through existing documentation and archeological discoveries, we are attempting, not to glorify a people, but to tell as much of the truth about our people as can be found in a relatively short single volume.