From Superman to Man

“The first book from ‘a tireless champion of African history’, a novel that ‘challenged the theories that Blacks were inferior to whites’.” —New York Amsterdam News
“A bold discussion novel in which a cultured, well-travelled, black Pullman porter is drawn into a debate with a white passenger, a Southern senator, on the question of the superiority of the Anglo Saxon and the inferiority of the Negro.” —The Guardian
“A genuine treasure. I still insist that From ‘Superman’ to Man is the greatest book ever written in English on the Negro by a Negro and I am glad to know that increasing thousands of black and white readers re-echo the high opinion of it which I had expressed some years ago.” —Hubert Henry Harrison

This novel by Harlem Renaissance master Joel Augustus Roger, first published in 1917, is a polemic against the ignorance that feeds racism. A fast-moving train headed for California is at the center of the storyline, and Dixon, an African American porter, is working on it. A senator from Oklahoma who is racial prejudice-obsessed and outspoken is traveling with the group. A discussion about religion, science, and racial equality then ensues as the politician, who is unable to sleep, runs into Dixon in the smoking car.

Joel Augustus Rogers (September 6, 1880–March 26, 1966) was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and historian who contributed to the history of Africa and the African diaspora, especially the history of African Americans in the United States. His research spanned the academic fields of history, sociology and anthropology. He challenged prevailing ideas about race, demonstrated the connections between civilizations, and traced African achievements. He was one of the greatest popularizers of African history in the twentieth century. Rogers addresses issues such as the lack of scientific support for the idea of race, the lack of black history being told from a black person's perspective, and the fact of intermarriage and unions among peoples throughout history. A respected historian and gifted lecturer, Rogers was a close personal friend of the Harlem-based intellectual and activist Hubert Harrison. In the 1920s, Rogers worked as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise, and he served as the first black foreign correspondent from the United States.