Quote:Rogers was a meticulous researcher, astute scholar and concise writer.[citation needed] He traveled tirelessly on his quest for knowledge, which often took him directly to the source. While traveling in Europe, he frequented libraries, museums, and castles, finding sources that helped him document African ancestry and history. He challenged the biased viewpoint of Eurocentric historians and anthropologists.

Rogers gathered what he called "the bran of history". The bran of history was the uncollected, unexamined history of the world, and his interest was the history of black people. Rogers intended that the neglected parts of history would become part of the mainstream body of Western history. He saw black inclusion in white historical discourses as helping to bridge racial divides. His scholarship was meant to shed light on hitherto unexamined areas of Africana history, as well as combat the stereotypes of inferiority that were attributed to black people.

Rogers asserted that the color of skin did not determine intellectual genius, and that Africans had contributed more to the world than was previously acknowledged. He publicized the great black civilizations that had flourished in Africa during antiquity. He devoted his scholarship to vindicating a place for African people within Western history. According to Rogers, many ancient African civilizations had been primal molders of Western civilization and culture.

Quote:Joel Augustus Rogers was born September 6, 1880 or 1883, in Negril, Jamaica. One of eleven children, he was the son of mixed-race parents who were a minister and schoolteacher. His parents could afford to give Rogers and his ten siblings only a rudimentary education, but stressed the importance of learning. Rogers claimed to have had a "good basic education".

Rogers emigrated from Jamaica to the United States in 1906, living briefly in Chicago before settling in Harlem, New York. He became a naturalized citizen in 1916 and lived in New York most of his life. He was there during the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African-American artistic and intellectual life in numerous fields. He became a close personal friend of Hubert Harrison, an intellectual and activist based in Harlem.

While living in Chicago for a time in the 1920s, Rogers worked as a Pullman porter and as a reporter for the Chicago Enterprise. His job of Pullman porter allowed him to travel and observe a wide range of people. Through this travel, he was able to feed his appetite for knowledge, by using various libraries in the cities which he visited. He self-published the results of his research in several books.