SLAVES BEING HERDED TO AUCTION
"Go Tell My People Who They Are - The True Biblical Identity of Black People"
by Janice Swinton
Divine Legacy
My mother, Ann Odene Smith, promised her grandmother, Fannie Singleton, an ex-slave, that she would go to Africa when she grew up. Her grandmother told her many stories about the Africans, how proud they were, and how they lived. She made my mother, then preschool age, promise her that she would go to Africa when she grew up. She kept her promise and much more.
My mother’s grandmother Fannie Singleton (Donald) who was born a slave (left on photo above) and her daughter Eunice Smith, Mom’s mother (right on photo above).
One of the stories that her grandmother told her was of “Ole Aunt Harriett who usta steal the ni—ers and run away wid ‘em.” Herein lies the legacy - it is easy to assume, and my mother did after she grew up and understood history - that her grandmother was talking about the real underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who led her people out of slavery’s bondage. This is part of the legacy and stories my great-grandmother Fannie told my mother as a little girl, passing the legacy down to her from her experiences as a slave.
It is estimated that her grandmother was born around 1856 into slavery in Alabama. Her parents are listed in the Census record of 1880 as being from North and South Carolina. She was 54 in 1910, and would have been in her late sixties when my mother was born October 19, 1924 to Eunice T. Smith, one of eight children born to her grandmother. Her mother, Eunice, was born around 1882.
In a letter to me dated February 15, 1994, mom wrote of her grandparents and our heritage. She was proud of her grandparents Thomas Donald and Fannie Peltz Donald, “She was freed a young woman from good Christian owners; never a field slave. Her owner was John Brodas. Harriet (Tubman) Ross owner was another Brodas. Grandma often told me how low down and cruel the other Brodas brothers were. Grandma lived in the big house as family. Grandpa was freeborn. His daddy was the plantation owner; his mother was a Mandingo woman. He was a yellow ni—er so grandma said, and educated, much older than her. We know our ancestry – Peul’s of Africa, Mandingo and Dutch. Grandpa was a mean ‘son of a bitch.’ On her father’s side, her grandmother always referred to mom’s daddy as an Ethiopian Arab”.
It was her experiences with her grandmother and the stories and history that she passed on that God used to plant the seed in my mother to someday seek out the true history and identity of the Black nations. He placed His call in her heart as a child listening to the voice of her ancestors through the voice of her African grandmother to learn all she could about Africa and the Africans. She didn’t believe the lies of inferiority of this land and never felt inferior. My mother came from a proud black family.
After her first trip to Ethiopia in 1984 she wrote to an African friend:
“I came from a very proud to be black family. My grandmother had been a slave but to hear and listen to her, you would have been so proud of her. At that early preschool age, I promised myself that I would search and find out just who I (the black race) was. She always gave me a big boost in the things that she said.”
“Mrs. Ann”, as everyone knew her, was a self-taught scholar of African history, born in Edwards, Mississippi. She attended the Southern Christian Institute; the first school established for blacks in 1882, in her hometown of Edwards, Mississippi. She earned a teacher’s certificate, and taught school in poor, rural Mississippi towns. In 1981 she wrote a memoir of her teaching experiences entitled “God’s Step Chilluns: Poverty Raw and Evil, Naked and Ugly”.
On August 14, 1949, she married Robert McGee and went on to have six children. When she had done her due raising her family, and after her husband died, she began her research in earnest, traveling to Africa fifteen times between the years 1984 and her death in 1998. She researched Ancient Black History and Biblical History, exploring the African Diaspora, slave history, slave forts; the Great Sphinx, the Step pyramids and the pyramids of Egypt many times. She visited the Valley of the Kings, the tombs and temples, and explored and researched the Ancient Jewish and Christian traditions of Ethiopia.
She described her feelings thusly, when she first laid eyes on Ethiopia from high in the air, “We had taken a late night flight from Nairobi, Kenya in route to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The African moon above was like a large shinny coin. The sky was bright with millions of twinkling stars….Such a tranquil scene! We closed the shades and I fell asleep. I was awakened by a bright light on my face. It was morning. …The clouds below were disappearing. The beauty below was breathtaking. High jagged dark mountains dressed in dark green foliage dark shadows and sunlit crevices, valleys and high green plateaus unfolded below. “The words of my grandmother came to me; grandmother had always called my father an old Ethiopian Arab. Maybe indeed this was part of my home.” Mom wrote another sentence that I found amazing and truthful. “The children and people here in Addis Ababa looked like the African Americans in the U.S. The predominant difference was the Ethiopians were friendly.”
In her search for truth, she attended many lectures on slave history and African history during her many trips to Africa. She wrote to this same African friend:
I have searched hundreds of volumes of books looking for answers. After all of the searching, I found the main key to really understanding who we are and where we came from. What I had read in the history books, were fillers to the cracks. Hearing you speak of the history of Ethiopia, and reading the books which we were given, sealed the facts which I had learned from study, meditation and divine inspiration on the subject of the black races.
My mother was a devout Christian and follower of Christ. She felt called of God to search out and find the answers to the questions that burned in her soul. Unanswered questions from living in a country where black people had been brought and so cruelly treated; where she heard her grandmother’s stories of this Africa and the great black nations that lived there; and as a Christian she wanted to know the answer. She wrote volumes on her travels and research in an unpublished work “Lost Horizons of Ancient Black History” of which she had personally experienced, seen and touched. She recorded much of her travels on videos, photographs and in volumes of writing.
Even though I didn’t know it at the time, God was preparing me to take the baton and carry on this family legacy. In 1991 when I was 28 years old and attending the University Of Kansas School Of Journalism, I began a black history journey of my own, when, as a Journalism student, I was conducting research for an article in the library when I ran across the “Slave Narratives”. The Slave Narratives are volumes of books from a government works project during FDR’s presidency in the 1930’s. They sent young writers out to find ex-slaves and to write down their stories, just as they spoke them. To me, a black girl born in Washington D.C., but raised in Mississippi, this was the first true black history course I had ever had, and this came straight from the mouths of my ancestors, the remnants of African slaves. It was the truth of the South and this country revealed; the capture, subjugation and enslavement of a group of people simply because of the color of their skin.
I took home every volume, pored over every word, extrapolating truths, the good, the bad and the ugly. It was shocking and troubling that this horrendous event had taken place in this world and to Africa and Africans. It also gave me some answers to the many questions that I had about the condition of black people around the world and especially in America.
From these volumes I wrote “This White Man’s Religion” because as a Christian, devout to Jesus Christ, I knew it wasn’t true Christianity that led to this crime, herein the title, “This White Man’s Religion.” I knew that true Christians weren’t racist or segregationists; yet, eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings is still the most segregated hour of the week. I also wrote freelance articles about racial reconciliation; they were published in national magazines and local newspapers. I began to lecture on black history and racial reconciliation in schools, churches, libraries and colleges, as I needed to do something positive. After I graduated in 1992 with my B.S. in Journalism, emphasis on magazine, I founded and produced “Sistahs” A Magazine for Christian Black Women.” Later I wrote “Sisters & Brothers in Identity Crisis: Young African Americans in Search of Self”, an award winning play, written to educate young African Americans of their history. I also wrote a short booklet on “Listening to the Voices of the Ancestors” Slavery and the Disintegration of the African American Family Structure.”
To add to my education both journalistically and historically, my mother took me on an African Study Tour as a graduation present in 1991. For a little over two weeks we traveled to Ghana, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. We attended lectures on the African Slave Trade, visited slave holding forts including Goree Island in Senegal, Elmina and Cape Coast slave forts in Ghana. It was as though God allowed her to guide me to the land, Africa, to learn of its history in preparation for fulfilling God’s mandate. I was the only one of her six children to do so.
It would take another decade for me to understand the significance of my trip to Africa and my mother’s mission to study, research, and identify the African peoples of the Diaspora; and my desire to understand our history in America and slavery’s continued negative impact on black families and black identity. I wanted to understand why the church was so divided, how and when did being black become a “curse”. I had a strong desire to return to Mississippi and help bring healing and wholeness to my community. I returned hungry to minister the gospel, to teach, and educate people about black history and racial reconciliation, especially down south where most of the Slave Narratives had been recorded [Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and the Carolinas.] Instead, God led James and me to begin a fellowship in Lawrence, Kansas and to continue our work on racial reconciliation between the races. Then, in 1996, God called us to Maine as missionaries. Maine was not Mississippi, in fact it is 98% white.
Two years after we moved, in 1998, my dear mother died. I was devastated. But the words that she had spoken to me while hospitalized rang clear in my ear, “Baby, I’ve finished my race, now it’s time for you to run yours.” After her funeral I gathered some of her writings, pictures, clothing, and returned to Maine.
In 1999, one year after her death James and I opened up Freedom Café in Waterville, Maine. I had shared this dream with my mother in 1998 before she died. Neither of us had any experience whatsoever in the restaurant business but I felt strongly led to open up this business after working as a manager in transcription at Maine General Hospital. Her death fueled my desire to be “free”, freedom from the constraints and restraints of a system of bondage. So, for twelve years we served physical soul food and spiritual soul food in what became a very popular and successful restaurant in Maine. At the same time, I ministered and worked among the people of Maine – winning souls and disciplining them for Christ. I mostly worked with the women of Maine in workshops, Bible studies, spiritual retreats, and one-on-one counseling. I have written of my work with women of sexual abuse and domestic abuse in “Fleshly Adams: The Root & Fruit of Sexual Perversity” (available on Amazon), and for recipes and a history of Freedom Café, “Southern Comfort up North: a Biographical Cookbook”, (out of print) and “Freedom Café Farewell Cookbook 2010” also (available on Amazon).
In December of 2008 God had given James and I clear direction that it was time to leave Maine and move back to Mississippi. I resisted it for over a year, until He finally made it crystal clear in December of 2009 that we were suppose to move. I knew that journey was ending.
In February 2010, I was sitting on the floor of my Maine apartment rummaging through my old manuscripts and articles on Black History, as God had instructed me to gather up all the work that I had done before moving to Maine in 1996. I had put all of my work away regarding slave history and black history - the social and cultural issues in our community, as I had no need of them living and ministering to predominately white people in a 98% white state.
At that particular time, James and I had been reading through the Bible and had just read the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 19, the verses that struck me were verses 20 through 25 where God is talking about Egypt and how the Egyptians will return to Him and worship Him. He goes on to say through the Prophet Isaiah that He will smite Egypt and heal her. But the Scripture that spoke the clearest was Isaiah 19:23-25:
In that day Egypt and Assyria will be connected by a highway. The Egyptians and Assyrians will move freely between their lands, and they will both worship God. 24 And Israel will be their ally. The three will be together, and Israel will be a blessing to them. 25 for the Lord of Heaven’s Armies will say, “Blessed be Egypt, my people. Blessed be Assyria, the land I have made. Blessed be Israel, my special possession![i]
What! I said to God. Is Egypt your people? How could that be for years people had been fighting over the color of the Egyptians? Egyptologists and archaeologists had all declared that the Egyptians were Caucasians. They had written volumes of works, dug up a myriad of artifacts, lopped off and disfigured all the statures with clearly black features, while all the time declaring that “blacks were incapable of such grandeur, science, architecture, medicine, and knowledge”. Truly, He didn’t mean that the Egyptians were black people?” I was intrigued because I had always believed that the Egyptians were indeed black. I knew He was trying to direct me to a truth that had yet to be completely uncovered; a truth that only God knew, not the Egyptologists, archaeologists, scientists, theologians and anthropologists, but the Creator Himself.
At that time I had begun researching the scriptures and history of Ancient Egypt which led to some amazing revelations. About three weeks later, again, sitting on my apartment floor in Maine, He told me to go find my mother’s writings that I had brought home after her funeral and put away in a China cabinet. It was then that I realized that what I had been working on concerning the biblical history of black nations was the exact same things I found in her notes and her writings from twenty five years earlier. I couldn’t believe it but there it was, God told me to finish the mission He had assigned to her, to identity and tell black people who they were in Him. Specifically He said to me “Go tell my people who they are.”
I realized that I needed to know the truth about the Black nations as only God could reveal. I had to be re-educated by God Himself. I had to be told FIRST who we were, before I could go “tell black people who God declares they are”. It started a century ago with my great-grandmother Fannie Singleton, whose love of her African heritage sparked a flame in my mother to find out more about the identity of the African people. My mother shared her love of Africa and its history with me until God passed the baton on to me, commissioning me to finish the work of correctly identifying the black nations. It started at the University of Kansas library with the volumes of Slave Narratives and was further flamed with Him highlighting Isaiah 19, “Egypt My people” but didn’t end there, that was only the beginning, the rest you will read in the pages of this book, as I obey His mandate to “go tell my people who they are.”
[i] King James Version, Isaiah 19: 20-25, public domain.
My mother, Ann Odene Smith, promised her grandmother, Fannie Singleton, an ex-slave, that she would go to Africa when she grew up. Her grandmother told her many stories about the Africans, how proud they were, and how they lived. She made my mother, then preschool age, promise her that she would go to Africa when she grew up. She kept her promise and much more.
My mother’s grandmother Fannie Singleton (Donald) who was born a slave (left on photo above) and her daughter Eunice Smith, Mom’s mother (right on photo above).
One of the stories that her grandmother told her was of “Ole Aunt Harriett who usta steal the ni—ers and run away wid ‘em.” Herein lies the legacy - it is easy to assume, and my mother did after she grew up and understood history - that her grandmother was talking about the real underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who led her people out of slavery’s bondage. This is part of the legacy and stories my great-grandmother Fannie told my mother as a little girl, passing the legacy down to her from her experiences as a slave.
It is estimated that her grandmother was born around 1856 into slavery in Alabama. Her parents are listed in the Census record of 1880 as being from North and South Carolina. She was 54 in 1910, and would have been in her late sixties when my mother was born October 19, 1924 to Eunice T. Smith, one of eight children born to her grandmother. Her mother, Eunice, was born around 1882.
In a letter to me dated February 15, 1994, mom wrote of her grandparents and our heritage. She was proud of her grandparents Thomas Donald and Fannie Peltz Donald, “She was freed a young woman from good Christian owners; never a field slave. Her owner was John Brodas. Harriet (Tubman) Ross owner was another Brodas. Grandma often told me how low down and cruel the other Brodas brothers were. Grandma lived in the big house as family. Grandpa was freeborn. His daddy was the plantation owner; his mother was a Mandingo woman. He was a yellow ni—er so grandma said, and educated, much older than her. We know our ancestry – Peul’s of Africa, Mandingo and Dutch. Grandpa was a mean ‘son of a bitch.’ On her father’s side, her grandmother always referred to mom’s daddy as an Ethiopian Arab”.
It was her experiences with her grandmother and the stories and history that she passed on that God used to plant the seed in my mother to someday seek out the true history and identity of the Black nations. He placed His call in her heart as a child listening to the voice of her ancestors through the voice of her African grandmother to learn all she could about Africa and the Africans. She didn’t believe the lies of inferiority of this land and never felt inferior. My mother came from a proud black family.
After her first trip to Ethiopia in 1984 she wrote to an African friend:
“I came from a very proud to be black family. My grandmother had been a slave but to hear and listen to her, you would have been so proud of her. At that early preschool age, I promised myself that I would search and find out just who I (the black race) was. She always gave me a big boost in the things that she said.”
“Mrs. Ann”, as everyone knew her, was a self-taught scholar of African history, born in Edwards, Mississippi. She attended the Southern Christian Institute; the first school established for blacks in 1882, in her hometown of Edwards, Mississippi. She earned a teacher’s certificate, and taught school in poor, rural Mississippi towns. In 1981 she wrote a memoir of her teaching experiences entitled “God’s Step Chilluns: Poverty Raw and Evil, Naked and Ugly”.
On August 14, 1949, she married Robert McGee and went on to have six children. When she had done her due raising her family, and after her husband died, she began her research in earnest, traveling to Africa fifteen times between the years 1984 and her death in 1998. She researched Ancient Black History and Biblical History, exploring the African Diaspora, slave history, slave forts; the Great Sphinx, the Step pyramids and the pyramids of Egypt many times. She visited the Valley of the Kings, the tombs and temples, and explored and researched the Ancient Jewish and Christian traditions of Ethiopia.
She described her feelings thusly, when she first laid eyes on Ethiopia from high in the air, “We had taken a late night flight from Nairobi, Kenya in route to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The African moon above was like a large shinny coin. The sky was bright with millions of twinkling stars….Such a tranquil scene! We closed the shades and I fell asleep. I was awakened by a bright light on my face. It was morning. …The clouds below were disappearing. The beauty below was breathtaking. High jagged dark mountains dressed in dark green foliage dark shadows and sunlit crevices, valleys and high green plateaus unfolded below. “The words of my grandmother came to me; grandmother had always called my father an old Ethiopian Arab. Maybe indeed this was part of my home.” Mom wrote another sentence that I found amazing and truthful. “The children and people here in Addis Ababa looked like the African Americans in the U.S. The predominant difference was the Ethiopians were friendly.”
In her search for truth, she attended many lectures on slave history and African history during her many trips to Africa. She wrote to this same African friend:
I have searched hundreds of volumes of books looking for answers. After all of the searching, I found the main key to really understanding who we are and where we came from. What I had read in the history books, were fillers to the cracks. Hearing you speak of the history of Ethiopia, and reading the books which we were given, sealed the facts which I had learned from study, meditation and divine inspiration on the subject of the black races.
My mother was a devout Christian and follower of Christ. She felt called of God to search out and find the answers to the questions that burned in her soul. Unanswered questions from living in a country where black people had been brought and so cruelly treated; where she heard her grandmother’s stories of this Africa and the great black nations that lived there; and as a Christian she wanted to know the answer. She wrote volumes on her travels and research in an unpublished work “Lost Horizons of Ancient Black History” of which she had personally experienced, seen and touched. She recorded much of her travels on videos, photographs and in volumes of writing.
Even though I didn’t know it at the time, God was preparing me to take the baton and carry on this family legacy. In 1991 when I was 28 years old and attending the University Of Kansas School Of Journalism, I began a black history journey of my own, when, as a Journalism student, I was conducting research for an article in the library when I ran across the “Slave Narratives”. The Slave Narratives are volumes of books from a government works project during FDR’s presidency in the 1930’s. They sent young writers out to find ex-slaves and to write down their stories, just as they spoke them. To me, a black girl born in Washington D.C., but raised in Mississippi, this was the first true black history course I had ever had, and this came straight from the mouths of my ancestors, the remnants of African slaves. It was the truth of the South and this country revealed; the capture, subjugation and enslavement of a group of people simply because of the color of their skin.
I took home every volume, pored over every word, extrapolating truths, the good, the bad and the ugly. It was shocking and troubling that this horrendous event had taken place in this world and to Africa and Africans. It also gave me some answers to the many questions that I had about the condition of black people around the world and especially in America.
From these volumes I wrote “This White Man’s Religion” because as a Christian, devout to Jesus Christ, I knew it wasn’t true Christianity that led to this crime, herein the title, “This White Man’s Religion.” I knew that true Christians weren’t racist or segregationists; yet, eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings is still the most segregated hour of the week. I also wrote freelance articles about racial reconciliation; they were published in national magazines and local newspapers. I began to lecture on black history and racial reconciliation in schools, churches, libraries and colleges, as I needed to do something positive. After I graduated in 1992 with my B.S. in Journalism, emphasis on magazine, I founded and produced “Sistahs” A Magazine for Christian Black Women.” Later I wrote “Sisters & Brothers in Identity Crisis: Young African Americans in Search of Self”, an award winning play, written to educate young African Americans of their history. I also wrote a short booklet on “Listening to the Voices of the Ancestors” Slavery and the Disintegration of the African American Family Structure.”
To add to my education both journalistically and historically, my mother took me on an African Study Tour as a graduation present in 1991. For a little over two weeks we traveled to Ghana, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. We attended lectures on the African Slave Trade, visited slave holding forts including Goree Island in Senegal, Elmina and Cape Coast slave forts in Ghana. It was as though God allowed her to guide me to the land, Africa, to learn of its history in preparation for fulfilling God’s mandate. I was the only one of her six children to do so.
It would take another decade for me to understand the significance of my trip to Africa and my mother’s mission to study, research, and identify the African peoples of the Diaspora; and my desire to understand our history in America and slavery’s continued negative impact on black families and black identity. I wanted to understand why the church was so divided, how and when did being black become a “curse”. I had a strong desire to return to Mississippi and help bring healing and wholeness to my community. I returned hungry to minister the gospel, to teach, and educate people about black history and racial reconciliation, especially down south where most of the Slave Narratives had been recorded [Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and the Carolinas.] Instead, God led James and me to begin a fellowship in Lawrence, Kansas and to continue our work on racial reconciliation between the races. Then, in 1996, God called us to Maine as missionaries. Maine was not Mississippi, in fact it is 98% white.
Two years after we moved, in 1998, my dear mother died. I was devastated. But the words that she had spoken to me while hospitalized rang clear in my ear, “Baby, I’ve finished my race, now it’s time for you to run yours.” After her funeral I gathered some of her writings, pictures, clothing, and returned to Maine.
In 1999, one year after her death James and I opened up Freedom Café in Waterville, Maine. I had shared this dream with my mother in 1998 before she died. Neither of us had any experience whatsoever in the restaurant business but I felt strongly led to open up this business after working as a manager in transcription at Maine General Hospital. Her death fueled my desire to be “free”, freedom from the constraints and restraints of a system of bondage. So, for twelve years we served physical soul food and spiritual soul food in what became a very popular and successful restaurant in Maine. At the same time, I ministered and worked among the people of Maine – winning souls and disciplining them for Christ. I mostly worked with the women of Maine in workshops, Bible studies, spiritual retreats, and one-on-one counseling. I have written of my work with women of sexual abuse and domestic abuse in “Fleshly Adams: The Root & Fruit of Sexual Perversity” (available on Amazon), and for recipes and a history of Freedom Café, “Southern Comfort up North: a Biographical Cookbook”, (out of print) and “Freedom Café Farewell Cookbook 2010” also (available on Amazon).
In December of 2008 God had given James and I clear direction that it was time to leave Maine and move back to Mississippi. I resisted it for over a year, until He finally made it crystal clear in December of 2009 that we were suppose to move. I knew that journey was ending.
In February 2010, I was sitting on the floor of my Maine apartment rummaging through my old manuscripts and articles on Black History, as God had instructed me to gather up all the work that I had done before moving to Maine in 1996. I had put all of my work away regarding slave history and black history - the social and cultural issues in our community, as I had no need of them living and ministering to predominately white people in a 98% white state.
At that particular time, James and I had been reading through the Bible and had just read the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 19, the verses that struck me were verses 20 through 25 where God is talking about Egypt and how the Egyptians will return to Him and worship Him. He goes on to say through the Prophet Isaiah that He will smite Egypt and heal her. But the Scripture that spoke the clearest was Isaiah 19:23-25:
In that day Egypt and Assyria will be connected by a highway. The Egyptians and Assyrians will move freely between their lands, and they will both worship God. 24 And Israel will be their ally. The three will be together, and Israel will be a blessing to them. 25 for the Lord of Heaven’s Armies will say, “Blessed be Egypt, my people. Blessed be Assyria, the land I have made. Blessed be Israel, my special possession![i]
What! I said to God. Is Egypt your people? How could that be for years people had been fighting over the color of the Egyptians? Egyptologists and archaeologists had all declared that the Egyptians were Caucasians. They had written volumes of works, dug up a myriad of artifacts, lopped off and disfigured all the statures with clearly black features, while all the time declaring that “blacks were incapable of such grandeur, science, architecture, medicine, and knowledge”. Truly, He didn’t mean that the Egyptians were black people?” I was intrigued because I had always believed that the Egyptians were indeed black. I knew He was trying to direct me to a truth that had yet to be completely uncovered; a truth that only God knew, not the Egyptologists, archaeologists, scientists, theologians and anthropologists, but the Creator Himself.
At that time I had begun researching the scriptures and history of Ancient Egypt which led to some amazing revelations. About three weeks later, again, sitting on my apartment floor in Maine, He told me to go find my mother’s writings that I had brought home after her funeral and put away in a China cabinet. It was then that I realized that what I had been working on concerning the biblical history of black nations was the exact same things I found in her notes and her writings from twenty five years earlier. I couldn’t believe it but there it was, God told me to finish the mission He had assigned to her, to identity and tell black people who they were in Him. Specifically He said to me “Go tell my people who they are.”
I realized that I needed to know the truth about the Black nations as only God could reveal. I had to be re-educated by God Himself. I had to be told FIRST who we were, before I could go “tell black people who God declares they are”. It started a century ago with my great-grandmother Fannie Singleton, whose love of her African heritage sparked a flame in my mother to find out more about the identity of the African people. My mother shared her love of Africa and its history with me until God passed the baton on to me, commissioning me to finish the work of correctly identifying the black nations. It started at the University of Kansas library with the volumes of Slave Narratives and was further flamed with Him highlighting Isaiah 19, “Egypt My people” but didn’t end there, that was only the beginning, the rest you will read in the pages of this book, as I obey His mandate to “go tell my people who they are.”
[i] King James Version, Isaiah 19: 20-25, public domain.