Tuesday, August 22, 2017
BENJAMIN BANNEKER'S JOURNAL
Benjamin Banneker, whose museum we visited in 2016, near Baltimore, was descended from the Dogon tribe of West Africa, from his grandfather, whose name was "Banaka." Benjamin also predicted solar and lunar eclipses, in his ephemeris (almanac) of the states of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. It was widely circulated. He died in 1806. Most of his writings were burned up in a mysterious fire on the same day that he was buried. He was earlier a surveyor for the nation's new Capital (DC); approved by Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Banneker refuted by his own life and work, in famous correspondence several racist racial assertions that Jefferson had written about the innate inferiority of blacks ' intelligence in his book NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA "Query XIV." (1785)
http://www.mdhs.org/underbelly/2014/02/06/the-dreams-of-benjamin-banneker/