The Black Researcher

 Here's the racist behind the popular Christmas carol Jingle Bells . Jingles Sell, Minstrels Tell. What happens when you find out that your favorite Christmas carol was written by a racist to be performed in racist style? Childhood ruined. James Lord Pierpont (1822-1893), the uncle of billionaire banker J. P. [John Pierpont] Morgan (1837-1913), also happens to be the man that wrote and composed the holiday song Jingle Bells . A quick internet search for the background to the song will reveal that Pierpont wrote it in 1857 a few years before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. One might even find that the song was inspired by an actual American sleigh racing tradition, but was likely intended for Thanksgiving rather than Christmas. What is not so apparent is the fact that Pierpont was a racist, whose lyrics for even his most popular tune were not meant for children . Here's what the original tune for Jingle Bells sounded like: You will notice that Pierpont's arrangement wa...

One man was such a threat to British rule that they cooked him for 10 hours straight.   The Brutal Punishments of Black Slaves 'Barbarities in the West Indias [Indies]' April 23, 1791 Artist: Hannah Humphrey (Source: UK National Portrait Gallery ) The picture above is a caricature depicting a scene in a British island colony, described in shocking detail during a debate before the British parliament on the abolition of the slave trade. The motion before the floor was presented by the abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833). An excerpt  of a speech from the debate is written at the bottom of the print. Mr Frances [sic] relates 'Among numberless other acts of cruelty daily practised, an English Negro driver, because a young Negro through sickness was unable to work, threw him into a copper of boiling sugar juice, and after keeping him steeped over head and ears for above three quarters of an hour in the boiling liquid whipt him with such severity, that it was near six m...

 The Fraud God James Anthony Froude 1860 Photographers: John & Charles Watkins (Source: UK National Portrait Gallery ) I am currently reading the book Froudacity: West Indian Fables by J. A. Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas - a book written and published by Trinidadian author John Jacob Thomas in 1889. Front cover of Froudacity  (1889) by J. J. Thomas (Source: British Library ) Thomas wrote the book as a response to James Anthony Froude's book The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses , published the previous year. That book by Froude, an unapologetic racist and White supremacist, was full of lies about Blacks he observed while they were under British colonial rule in the Caribbean islands, especially in Trinidad. Front cover of The English in the West Indies (1888) by J. A. Froude (Credit: Nicholas Laughlin on Flickr ) Penelope Weeping Over the Bow of Ulysses 1779 Creator: Angelica Kauffmann (Source: The William Benton Museum of Art ) Froude title...

Black People Were Never Truly United.  The Top Five Reasons Why Black People Were Not United Against Their Enslavement Shipping Slaves Through The Surf, West African Coast. A Cruiser Signaled in Sight (From a Sketch by a Merchant on the Coast) 1856 (Source:  The Church Missionary Intelligencer: A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information, vol 7 , via Slavery Images ) Black people have been through it all.  We have been through the thick and the thin; the pain and the gain; the highs and lows; the sunshine and the rain. But even while we endured these trials together, we were never a fully unified people. Here are some of the primary reasons why we were not united in the time of our greatest adversity: universal enslavement.

Was Abraham Gannibal Really A Black African? Left: 1888 drawing of Abraham Gannibal speaking with Alexander Suvorov; Right: signature of 'Ganibal' in letter from the Tallinn City Archive in Estonia (Source: Wikipedia Commons ) It was long believed that the ancestor of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, was a "Caucasian" man from North Africa. After the death of Abraham Gannibal in 1781, a portrait of General Ivan Muller-Sakomelsky (1725-1790), commonly mistaken for an image of Gannibal, further advanced this theory. Portrait of Alexey Wolfe 1830s (Source: Wikipedia Commons )   Even Pushkin's close friend, Alexei Nikolaevich Wulf (1805-1881), hinted in his diary that Pushkin himself believed his great grand-father came to Russia from Abyssinia (a kingdom in modern-day Ethiopia). This knowledge of Gannibal's birthplace was based on the earliest biography of Gannibal, written by his son-in-law, Adam Karpovich Rotkirkh, around the 1780s. Yet, in his b...

Image Credit: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout Let's talk about this thing called IQ. 🤔 It seems that race and IQ are always a hot topic. I personally don't understand the hype about IQ but some people think that it is the gospel truth. They swear by it as if there is nothing else that be used to measure intelligence. Then they want to compare intelligence between people and groups of people, hoping to make a statement about how they rank or how some people are smarter or dumber than others. Human nature is to be competitive. It is competition for resources (and to some, for the control of those resources) which has enabled the survival of certain individuals and wider cultures over others. Against this background, we have people who hold an obsession with IQ. They take it quite literally. They go as far as to make claims based on the results about how measured intelligence ought to be used in the real world such as this one in...