Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Friday, May 29, 2020
INTELLECTUAL TRANSCENDENCE
William Damani KeeneLarry, MANY THANKS! I've wondered if Douglass and Fermin had met.
Fermin was a Brother of deep insight. I used his quote to start a discussion thread in 2012 that at this point has 84,506 views.
QUOTE
"If we could prove, on the basis of recent advances in our knowledge of history, that the Egyptian people were not a White race, as so many have constantly maintained through rigid adherence to systems of thought and retrospective pride ever since Egyptology [determined]the overwhelming importance of this ancient nation, what further argument could be mustered to salvage the doctrine of the inequality of the races? The answer is, none.
"The anthropologists and scientists who support such a theory realize its inanity to such an extent that they have resorted to all sorts of conceptual subtleties, construed all kinds of specious arguments into convincing reasons, accepted all types of scholarly ravings as serious probabilities, all in order to make people believe that the ancient Egyptians were White.
"Caucasian presumption could not suffer the idea that, in the first flowering of progress, a race Europeans consider radically inferior could produce a nation to which Europe owes everything, for Egypt is responsible for the original intellectual and moral achievements which constitute the foundations of modern civilization. Fortunately, light is being shed today on all the basic issues, particularly in the field of Egyptology. Scientists from all the great nations have conducted research in the field with enthusiasm and with a sense of emulation even rivalry, to the greater glory of science. It is becoming impossible, then, to resist the evidence of facts and to remain captive of obsolete theories."
-- Antenor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, p. 227-228 (2002)
https://onnidan1.com/forum/index.php...
Larry Delano Coleman I defer to your sagacity, dear brother, in quoting Antonin Firmin. His groundings with Douglass, although brief, underscore the value of temporal transcendence. It is unfortunate that Firmin could not make it to the pinnacle of Haitian politics. At least, he left his book, which some of us have read. Perhaps, we can make more of Haiti's President Hyppolite's appointment of Douglass as Haiti's representative to the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893; two year's before the Cotton Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, where Booker T. Washington arose, continuing aspects of Firmin, Douglass, Hyppolite.