[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 169 (Monday, November 16, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2761-E2762]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




RECOGNIZING THE HARLEM COUNCIL OF ELDERS, INC., SALUTE TO EGYPTOLOGIST 
                      DR. YOSEF A.A. BEN-JOCHANNAN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, November 16, 2009

  Mr. RANGEL. Madam Speaker, I rise with great pride to join New York 
Democratic County Leader Keith L.T. Wright and the Harlem Council of 
Elders to pay tribute to Egyptologist and Pan-Africanist, Dr. Yosef 
A.A. Ben-Jochannan (Dr. Ben), Harlem's internationally renowned 
historian and educator of the African Diaspora.
  In 1918, Dr. Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan, affectionately known as Dr. 
Ben was born in Gondar, Ethiopia to Krstan ben Jochannan, a lawyer and 
diplomat, and Tulia Matta, a native of Puerto Rico, who was a homemaker 
and midwife. Dr. Ben's parents were both of the Jewish faith. His 
father was a member of the ``Falasha,'' or Beta Israel, and his mother 
was a descendent of Spanish Sephardic Jews. Krstan ben and Tulia met in 
Madrid, Spain, where she was attending college and he was working as a 
diplomatic attache. Soon after their marriage, they traveled from Spain 
to Ethiopia where their son, Yosef, was born.
  In Ethiopia, he spent the first five years of his life, later on 
moving to the Americas. He said in later interviews that, in the 1920s, 
the Ethiopian government sent his father to Brazil to help develop its 
coffee trade. They lived for about a year in Rio de Janeiro before a 
1928 coup in Ethiopia saw the overthrow of Empress Zauditu and the 
consolidation of power under Emperor Haile Selassie. After the change 
in political leadership, the family decided not to return to Ethiopia 
but instead settled permanently in Puerto Rico. Yosef was raised 
primarily in the town of Fajardo, located on the eastern side of Puerto 
Rico, and the nearby islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas, where his 
mother had relatives. He was thus fluent in Spanish and English from an 
early age.
  Dr. Ben attended the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, where 
he first studied law, but later switched to civil engineering. He 
graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1939. In his senior year 
of college Dr. Ben wrote and self-published a booklet titled Nosotros 
los Hebreos Negros (We the Black Hebrews) about his experience growing 
up black and Jewish on a predominately Catholic island where at the 
time people of African ancestry were commonly viewed as inferior. Dr. 
Ben's father was fluent in several languages and often spoke with his 
son about the significance of Ethiopia's ancient past. However, at 
school and in the community, he frequently heard the view that Africa 
was a backward and wretched continent. In response to this, his father 
sent him to visit his grandparents in Ethiopia, where he stayed for 
several months. To get there, Dr. Ben traveled by ship to Egypt, then 
took a train through that country to Ethiopia, and thus began his 
lifelong fascination with Africa's 4,000-mile-long Nile Valley.

  Upon his return to Puerto Rico, he worked briefly as a lawyer and in 
1941 moved to New York City with his maternal uncle, Casper Holstein, a 
self-made millionaire and philanthropist who had become rich from the 
Harlem

[[Page E2762]]

``numbers racket.'' Holstein was one of the largest contributors to 
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was also 
politically active in his native Virgin Islands. Dr. Ben gained a 
unique insight into the rich cultural milieu of black New York, 
including its lively street life, informal ``numbers'' lotteries, 
street-corner preachers, and politics. At the time, Harlem was the 
epicenter of African American activism in support of Ethiopia, which 
had been invaded and occupied by Italy under Benito Mussolini during 
World War II. Although the occupation ended the year he arrived in New 
York, Dr. Ben joined the Ethiopian World Federation and African 
Nationals in America.
  Ben Jochannan initially found work as a draftsman, but he was drawn 
to the study of Africa and its ancient history. He began to speak on 
Harlem street corners, mostly about African history, taking part in a 
tradition of public speechmaking that was one of the neighborhood's 
unique attributes, joining such noteworthy contemporaries as Arthur 
Reid, Carlos Cooks, and Wentworth Matthew. He then came to know several 
members of the Harlem History Club's leading intellectuals and 
historians such as John Henrik Clarke, J. A. Rogers, John G. Jackson, 
and Richard B. Moore. During the late 1940s, Dr. Ben met and befriended 
a young man known as ``Detroit Red,'' who used to hustle on the corner 
below his Harlem office. Their friendship deepened after ``Detroit 
Red'' joined the Nation of Islam in prison, returning to Harlem as 
Malcolm X. They remained close up until Malcolm's assassination in 
1965.
  Through this early period of his life in the United States, Dr. Ben 
maintained the Jewish faith of his upbringing, attending Harlem's 
Commandment Keeper's Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation led by Rabbi 
Wentworth A. Matthew and other synagogues. In New York, he continued to 
struggle as he had in Puerto Rico, with the prevailing societal 
presumption that tended to question his identity as an African Jew; 
while at the same time, his study of ancient Egyptian history and 
spiritual practices was having an ever increasing impact on his 
thinking. He later wrote in several of his books, his differences with 
other Jews and his intense identification with the African American 
struggle eventually caused his complete break with Western man's 
Talmudic Judaism.
  In the 1950s, Dr. Ben worked as a researcher for UNESCO and with the 
Zanzibar mission to the United Nations until that country merged with 
Tanganyika to become Tanzania in 1961. He later began teaching as an 
adjunct professor in New York, mostly as a lecturer on African history 
at such schools as Marymount College at Tarrytown and at Columbia 
Teacher's College. In 1957, Dr. Ben led a group of nine African 
American educators to Egypt to show evidence of his contention that 
sites such as Abu Simbel, the temple of Isis at Philae Island, and the 
royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings were the remains of ancient 
black civilizations. He began a series of these trips over the years, 
and by his estimation led several thousand African Americans to Egypt, 
Sudan, and Ethiopia over the next four decades. The trips not only 
facilitated his own study and writing, but they came to be a major part 
of his legacy as a teacher and contributor. In 1960, Dr. Ben self-
published his first work produced in the United States, entitled, 
``Black Man of the Nile,'' which he sold for $5 a copy at Lewis 
Michaux's National Memorial African Bookstore on Lenox Avenue. In 1961, 
he married Gertrude England, of St. Croix. The couple would go on to 
have nine daughters and three sons. They also adopted six other 
children. Throughout his career as a writer and teacher, Dr. Ben 
remained a fixture of the Harlem community where he raised his family.

  When Harlem was engulfed by several days of social unrest during the 
summer of 1964, after the police slaying of a local teenager, Dr. Ben 
was one of several Harlem activists who met with New York Mayor Robert 
Wagner and, later, John Lindsay to address systemic problems facing the 
black community in New York.
  As a historian and anthropologist, Dr. Ben would return to the Nile 
Valley more than fifty times and self-publish forty-two books on 
African pre-history; the civilizations of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia; 
and on religion. His work argued that the creators of ancient Egyptian 
civilization (the builders of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and cities and 
lodges) were Black Africans who first migrated north from the Central 
Rift Valley of present-day Tanzania and Uganda. He claimed that 
mainstream publishers refused to publish his work, saying that there 
was not sufficient public interest in them and that the publishers had 
no way to fact-check his claims. His books were known for their 
tendentious tone and crude presentation that included newspaper 
clippings, hand-drawn maps, and an informal, idiosyncratic writing 
style. However, these shortcomings did not reflect a disregard for 
academic standards such as citation, footnotes, and bibliography, which 
he supplied extensively. Dr. Ben chose to write in a manner that could 
be readily absorbed by both lay readers and researchers with little 
more than a middle-school education. He also steadfastly criticized the 
overall presentation of African history in American universities and 
museums. In the late 1960s, Dr. Ben worked briefly as a writer for a 
New York publishing company, W. H. Sadlier, where he wrote textbooks on 
African history such as Southern Lands.
  In 1973, he served as an adjunct professor of History and Egyptology 
at Cornell University's Africana Research Center, where his longtime 
friend and colleague John Henrik Clarke was teaching. Dr. Ben taught 
there for fifteen years, a period during which he also served as a 
visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Languages at Al Azhar University in 
Cairo, Egypt. In 1979, he traveled to the South Pacific where he 
lectured in Papua New Guinea about the native population's origins on 
the African continent. In 1984, he became one of six founding members 
of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization 
(ASCAC), an organization of black scholars focusing on the ancient 
African world. The other founders were John Henrik Clarke, Asa G. 
Hilliard III, Jacob H. Carruthers, Leonard Jeffries, and Maulana 
Karenga.
  Dr. Ben was a popular and sought-after lecturer on college campuses 
nationally and internationally, celebrated for his direct, polemical 
style and wit. In 1993, Mary Lefkowitz, a Wellesley classics professor, 
mentioned him prominently in a Wall Street Journal editorial that 
fueled an acerbic national debate about ``Afrocentrism'' in academia. 
Dr. Ben, a lifelong bibliophile had amassed a personal library of over 
15,000 books chronicling African and African American history. Outside 
of academia, Dr. Ben's reputation remains high particularly among many 
African American laypeople. Today, he can be frequently spotted around 
Harlem where residents greet him warmly as Dr. Ben!

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