- humanitypleading
- Jan 1, 2024
- 37 min read
African Origins - Dr. Ben-Jochannan & Dr. George Simmonds
Lee Naves: Welcome to the University of Alabama in Birmingham. My name is Lee Naves, and it's my privilege this evening to serve as moderator for the program. We have two very special guests. One is Dr. Yosef Ben-jochannan, who is an African anthropologist and educator, an author and a scholar. He's on my right.
Lee Naves: And on my left is Dr. George Simmons. Dr. Simmons is also a professor. He was born in Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, USA. And we will discuss a number of topics this evening. These gentlemen are here to talk about African origins. As you know, in America, Black History Month is celebrated every February.
Lee Naves: Without further ado, let's get right into it, because I know they have some interesting viewpoints that will stimulate your thinking even if you disagree with them or agree. I'm going to call you Dr. Ben, if that's okay, because I understand, if that's what people usually call you.
Dr. Ben: Yes.
Lee Naves: One of the more controversial positions that you take is that black Africans landed in America 2000 years before Columbus.
Dr. Ben: I would not specify the the day, but probably exceeding 2000 years. The fact is that Columbus never came to the United States of America or North and South America. He came as close as San Salvador. There a rumor that says that Columbus came to to America. He did not come to America. He came to an island off America West Coast. He came to America, not Columbus. He came to the Caribbean. But it is commonly stated just as much as the state that Columbus discovered America while the Indians sat down and watch him doing it now. But all the knowledge of Africans in the Americas quite knowledgeable to scholars. The fact that it's suppressed doesn't have any validity at all.
Lee Naves: Let me bounce a couple of things off of you. One thing, this article that I'm going to be referring to, to our home audience and to our studio audience, this article came out in the September 1981 issue of Science Digest, and it's entitled Black Kings and Ancient America. You and some other black scholars believed that these people, African people, came to this continent before Columbus.
Dr. Ben: We don't believe we know.
Lee Naves: How do you know?
Dr. Ben: The evidence the evidence is there? For example, when you go to Central America, the Yucatan Peninsula and Ecuador and places like that, they have caches of Carthaginian money found 200ft down in the ground, meaning that there were pluvial disruptions and those money was buried. So it it indicates a period of time, at least from that. When you look at the strategy, you could tell the period of time in which they've been here and what you're talking about, Carthage, you're talking about at least 212 BC when Carthage was finally destroyed by the by the by the Romans. Again, the Queen Queen Makeda, which you call the Queen of Sheba. There are maps which Rome, the church in Rome, the so-called Holy Father, has suppressed these maps from the time of Justinian showing the South America and what is today called Central America. The maps there and Victoria, I mean, I'm sorry, Mercator goes back to at least 892 B.C. before Christ before me point.
Lee Naves: Let me point out another thing just from the same article. I don't know if we can see this on television, but here is the tell me what this is and why do you see this as proof of the presence of Africans in America before.
Dr. Ben: That is the head of an Olmec, an Olmec and the Olmecs were said to be the first of the indigenous Americans. And if you look if an Olmec walk in here, then you would believe that he had come from the middle of Africa. And there is no doubt about it that all of the writers prior to racism admitted that the Olmecs were in fact Africans who had come across here. There is no doubt when Pigafetta and others. The point is that Van Sertima is writing and others. But Leo Wiener in 1938 at Harvard University, wrote a two volume book for which he was fired about the Africans and olmecs being Africans.
Lee Naves: Let me bounce this off of you. Okay. You take the same statue, you say, Well, you say that they're obviously black features, thick lips, broad nose, the stereotype. Okay. Other the stereotype, other anthropologists say, I think Michael Cole was one of them. He says that this is not a black man. He said the people who made these statues, which I understand are eight feet high, the people who made these statues didn't have sharp enough tools to give them white features. So they're not really black statues. They're white people carved with crude tools. What's your response to that?
Dr. Ben: It's strange that the tools were not sharp enough to make narrow noses, but it was sharp enough to put. Eyelids. So it would seems to me that an eyelid is harder to make than a nose. But Michael Cole is no less a racist than the head of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, what's the difference between Michael Regan and the Ku Klux Klan? They have the same philosophy. What is the difference between the fellow's right and the Bible and right about the Queen of Sheba? Asking I mean, saying to Solomon, Look. Look, not ye daughters of Cain. Look not upon me because I'm black. My parents sent me the vineyard and all this nonsense. She's black because nature made her black. Her mother and father were black. That's why she's black. Had nothing to do but going in anyway. Even though it's in the Bible.
Dr. Simmons: You talk about religion. We're going to get to that in a while. Let me turn to Dr. Simmons.
Lee Naves: You also agreed with this position that Africans were in this.
Dr. Simmons: I have no problem. No doubt. As a matter of fact, speaking about like Dr. Ben mentioned and you spoke about Michael Nico, I own a book several years ago and still have it in my possession by Michael Cole himself, who is considered one of America's leading archeologists and anthropologists from Yale, one of America's most prestigious schools. In his own work, he referred to them as Negroid, and he went further to state. The title of the book is America's First Civilization, where you call it civilization. And to turn around and to tell these youngsters and other people in America particular, that the black men were the first to build any type of civilization in the Americas will be disturbing to Americans. And so let.
Lee Naves: Let me ask you this. Even if you're right, let's say you're right. What difference does it make?
Dr. Simmons: makes a lot of difference what kind of difference it takes the inferiority complex out of the black men who felt that his only beginning and relationship here in this part of the world is that of slavery. Then it puts him in the driver's seat because again, they don't tell you that they're man made hills within the United States. They call them monkeys, and they range from in the Midwest all the way down the eastern sea coast of the United States. And they are found artifacts in them that are similar to things found in West Africa and in Egypt, which is Northeast Africa. That predates the arrival of the so called indigenous Indians to these lands. Another thing is, some years ago, one of the major television networks back in New York, I don't remember exactly which one ABC or which had did a documentary and they said that these olmecs are the ones who brought right into the Americas about 3000 B.C., to tell blacks that there ought to be glad to enter into these schools of higher learning today in order to read and write, because the ancestors back in Africa couldn't read and write. You see how what it will do to tell them that they brought right into the Americas. Antonio Pigafetta that Dr. Ben mentioned, who sailed with Magellan when Magellan came to the so-called New World in 1519 when they landed at the Land of Virgin, which we now call Brazil, they were met by people in canoes that carried as many as 40 people. Antonio Pigafetta recorded that these people were jet black. It seemed that they came out of the infernal marshes. That meant that they were burnt, he said. Naked and black as they are In 15, 19, 27 years after Columbus's arrival to the so-called New World. Another thing they don't tell you again, you heard my associate.
Lee Naves: Why haven't we heard these things before? Why don't we read them in The New York Times?
Dr. Simmons: If I stole another man's country and I brought your ancestors here to work for me, could I tell you how great your ancestors were and still expect to keep you in slavery?,
Dr. Ben: Let me, let me give you a better I'm not better necessarily, but an added situation of that. Most black people in Birmingham, Alabama, like in Harlem, New York, are Christians, and they go to a in a black community, a black minister, a black congregation, but with a white Jesus, because they didn't know that the that Jesus up until Pope Pope Julius the second had the first black Jesus painted. He had Michelangelo to do it. But up until that time, the world worshiped the black Madonna and child.
Dr. Ben: The present pope is going back to Poland to worship at the statue of the black Madonna and child. That's in the New York Times. But what The Times says the next day, don't worry about the black Madonna and the child. She was originally white, but there was a storm in the 16th century passed by and and and turn it black. But the same storm must have gone to Spain. And then it went to Ethiopia and it went. To the Soviet Union and turn all the black Madonnas. It was a hell of a storm.,
Lee Naves: Okay, let me just let's get together here. I mean, we're jumping around and I think we're going to have a beautiful, interesting hour. Okay. Because this subject I was going to get to this later, but since you opened it, let's deal with it. Okay. You're in the Bible belt, gentlemen.
Dr. Ben: I heard so.
Lee Naves: And I must tell our audience, we had dinner together earlier and we we got into this a little bit, so I you're going to hear some interesting things because you guys are taking issue with a lot of what we grew up with in the Bible as fact. And you're telling me that's not so. You got.
Dr. Simmons: I brought right here. What is it before I show you the picture you wanted to see, this is Pope Pius, the 12th in his private chapel praying to the black Madonna and child and all the popes of Rome in their private jets from the church. The Roman Catholic Church itself. Itself itself. I just got rid of the copy of the history of the Black Madonna last night. I brought one copy. It's published by the Roman Catholic Order of Nuns called the Daughters of Saint Paul and they said that the picture of the black Madonna and child in Poland is reputed to have been painted by Saint Luke. Now, Saint Luke is said to have been one of Jesus's disciples. He ought to know what Jesus had looked like. So if he painted a black woman and child, who am I to say that he wasn't? Besides that, however, in Anacalypsis.
Lee Naves: So now you guys. saying Jesus is black?
Dr. Ben: We're not saying it's what has been written on history. Up until the Nicene Conference of Bishops in 325, when Rome, under the order of Constantine, the Roman emperor, ordered the 219 bishop at Nicaea, and they took away Christianity from from from from the Africans. Just remember that before they said Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem. They said he was born in a cave in Ethiopia. It was at the Nicene Conference that changed that. Let's go further.
Lee Naves: Wait a minute, let me be sure I'm following you now. You're saying that the birth of Christ as we know it is not accurate.
Dr. Ben: It's a farce. It was only.
Lee Naves: You realize what you're saying.
Dr. Ben: A farce, a lie. You know what a lie is?
Dr. Simmons: A lie is a lie.
Dr. Ben: The person who wrote that at the Nicene Conference of Bishops in 325 AD Constantine, the Roman emperor, ordered a conference be held because Rome wanted to take over Christianity from the people who started it. Christianity was started with Pontius and Boethus in a place called Alexandria in Egypt and Egypt is in Africa. I saw it up to January the 9th. It was there.
Lee Naves: You talked about that a little bit last night in your lecture. There was a lecture last night, Dr. Simmons here on campus. He talked about the separation of people don't want us to see Egypt as part of Africa. You talked about the historical thing about blacks being in Egypt as well.
Dr. Simmons: What I did last night,
Lee Naves: I don't want to get away from the other point.,
Dr. Simmons: No. I'm just saying that what happened is that I dealt last night the fact that Herodotus, that the institutions of higher learning white institutions consider the father of history. He himself, when he visited Egypt around 450 B.C., almost half a thousand years before Christ, so that the Ethiopians, the Egyptians, the people of cultures, which is part of present day Turkey, were people of black skin and wooly hair. All right. And so I just want you to understand that the Egyptians we now see are conquerors, just like people who came here and took this land from the Indians so that they're not indigenous to Africa. Those who now rule Egypt and Egypt is just as much a part of Africa as Birmingham or Alabama is part of the so-called United States.
Lee Naves: Let me just be clear on this. So what you're saying to me now is that the people that we see, Sadat and all those guys are not true Egyptians.,
Dr. Ben: Sadat's mother was the Sudanese. Nasser's mother was a Sudanese, but their fathers were Arab conquerors. The one that was the African was Mohamed Naguib, the first president of Egypt, the one that overthrew Farouk. But one year after that, since he was looking for a hook up with the other Nile Valley countries as it used to be in antiquity, he was removed by the Arab conquerors. The Arabs didn't come to Egypt until 640. The first non-African people came to Egypt, otherwise called the Hyksos in 1675 BC. The Africans, they were already in the 13th dynastic period. They had built every pyramid. You saw them before they had done the stone in the Nile. They built every one of the major temples that had already been built, including the Grand Lodge of Luxor. The first European to come there did not arrive until the Greeks arrived with the Alexander the second, the son of Philip of Macedonia.
Lee Naves: Look, I'm a college graduate. I never heard all this stuff.
Dr. Ben: Because they didn't intend to teach you that. They can't tell you that you're inferior and teach you that you taught Egypt, Europe, the first Europeans to be civilized. By the Africans were the Greeks. When you heard of Homer, the first European, to have written anything, you couldn't miss that. They said that Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, and that was not until 833 BC. The Africans had already in 255,000 at the Tassili Mountains. They had a civilian period first, second and third. The Predynastic period all the way up. The Africans had produced men like this Imhotep, the multi genius that designed the step pyramid of Saqqara, the first man to be a physician, that even Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, is giving him credit and call him the god of medicine. The Greeks changed his name from Imhotep to Aesculapius. There he is. There he is.
Lee Naves: This gets into what you were saying. So wait a minute. You guys are telling me now that black men taught Homer.
Dr. Simmons: As a matter of fact, the Egyptians said Homer was Egyptian, not Greek.
Dr. Ben: That's right. It's only the Europeans said that. The Westerners now said it was. But let let us go back. Remember that Homer himself said in the Odyssey. What? That the gods, Zeus and Apollo, Europe's first gods, came from Ethiopia. Go read it. And I didn't write it. He wrote it. Thallus from Thallus down to Socrates and Socrates dunk to Aristotle, which they call the Pre-socratic philosophers, philosophers and the post-Christian philosophers. Each and every one, including Plato, who spent 15 years in Egypt receiving their education.
Lee Naves: You saying Plato was educated in Egypt.
Dr. Ben: 15 years, you heard nothing of him. Every one of them.
Lee Naves: What you'd have me believe then also is part of what you said last night is that Plato and these guys went back home and they were big guys, but they were taught in Egypt. Is that what your saying?
Dr. Ben: They came there for their education.
Dr. Simmons: They said.. They didn't hide it. It's the modern writers, the modern instructors and professors who tried to deny it.
Dr. Ben: You can't have a racist school in Birmingham with non-racist education.
Lee Naves: Let me get to something you said last night. That's not going to make you very popular in this town and may not allow you to get safely out of town. You told an audience last night that you saw, I think, in a tomb in Egypt you saw with your own two eyes. Right.
Dr. Ben: Yes.
Lee Naves: You told me that Moses, there were more than Ten Commandments.
Dr. Ben: Moses just took 42 negative confessions. Moses isn't supposed to have been born until 1349 BC. The Africans were already in their 18th dynastic period. Akhenaten, who died before Moses was born, and in Hotep, who who died more than 2000 years before the birth of Moses and others at the Grand Lodge of Mim had 42 laws called now the negative confession, one for each nome. They go like this. I have not killed man nor woman. I have not spoken ill of the gods. Moses is supposed to born in Egypt. They said that a place called Succoth already it says that Moses got the Ten Commandments among Sinai. Mount Sinai is still in Africa, right? Sinai Peninsula is a part of Egypt. More so. Is it possible for Moses to be born in Egypt, educated in Egypt at age 85? He's still in Egypt and he did not learn the negative confessions. Is it possible for you to go to school? Born in the United States, go to kindergarten, elementary, junior high school, high school and college? I never heard of the United States Constitution. Then it would have been impossible, impossible for Moses when everybody had to read the negative confession five times a day. For Moses not to have seen those 42 laws and extracted ten of the ten of them leave 32 more. Now, if you could get you could go to the temple of Taiwan at Abydos to go to the tomb of Rameses, the sixth at the Valley of the Kings, go to the temple of Edfu, where you would, by the way, see the story of an immaculate conception and a virgin birth 4100 years before the Mary and Jesus story.
Lee Naves: Wait, no, this is shocking. Let me just put it in the form of a question then. I mean, I don't want to stop this because we're here for information. But what you're trying to get me to believe is that Moses didn't get the Ten Commandments from Mt. Sinai, but he got them from his fellow Africans.
Dr. Ben: Moses was the high priest in Egypt, Egypt, high priest of the Egyptians in Egypt. Then what was he teaching? He wasn't the high priest of the Jews. There were no Jews in those days. They called them, remember Now there were no no Israel yet. Israel is not until eight 1196. And when we hear of Abraham of Ram, as he was called, coming into Egypt, the Egyptians, the Africans are already in Egypt, already in their 14th dynastic period. When he shows up, all of the pyramids are built. That's another thing. Every one of the 62 pyramids in Egypt were built before the first Jew was born.
Dr. Simmons: Why was he fleeing from the pharaoh? Let me ask. What was the charge? I can write anything when I want to write, you know. Who's going to stop me from writing if I got the power?
Lee Naves: I'm about to ask you, what kind of trouble do you get into for holding these kind of views?
Dr. Ben: The other day, a black sister spat in my face, and because she couldn't take that, she couldn't take that Jesus was black. She said, No, no, no. I mean, he ain't had no color if he didn't have no color. How John the Baptist saw into baptism.
Lee Naves: Do you realize that you're getting at the foundation that you're shooting and digging away at the foundation of what most of us grew up believing?
Dr. Ben: Yeah well, we believe a lot of things for a long time. One thing, they give us three pages in a Bible slave obey your master. And that's what we believe. For the longest time they said that Jesus said, So how would Jesus, who fought the system, say to the slave, obey your master? It didn't sound rational, would it? So, look, most of the things we're we're in a European system. You could come to this university and spend four years, go back and spend another two masses and another 1 or 2 for your doctorate and never had any course at all about Africans. But every day you come here you got courses about Europeans. This is an extension of European culture, European belief, European racism. And it has no intent of teaching about the Africans. The Africans built the Europeans First University, the University of Salamanca in Spain. These are historical records. They just it's just like.
Lee Naves: One of the things you said last night is that it's not just black people who are saying these things.
Dr. Simmons: Most of this information are written by whites in white books. It's just that they don't emphasize it in the classroom. As a matter of fact, let me back you up when you open up the discourse. We were speaking about Columbus. None of them in here, none of the listening audience, even in the air, has the faintest idea that in the life of Columbus, when after his death, his family had to go to court because charges was raised And this is in the record in the Vatican, in the secret archives of the Vatican, that Columbus was shown a map of where the Queen of Sheba, the doctor Ben, spoke about this black woman who had made it with with Solomon and produced the son Menelik, the first. And they lived more than 900 years before the birth of Jesus had already sailed through what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar, came to lands to the west that was longer than Africa and Europe combined. And that brother is north, south and Central America.
Dr. Ben: May I add this? You right here at this university they teach and I've just been here a few days a day. They teach in this institution because it's the same as Cornell anywhere that Hippocrates was the father of medicine. He's not until 333 B.C. Let me read this for you.
Lee Naves: Okay, you teach at Cornell.
Dr. Ben: I teach at Cornell, also Egypt.
Lee Naves: They let you teach this kind of stuff at Cornell?
Dr. Ben: They teach it now, I'm there!
Lee Naves: in seventing hundred BC. That's 1400 years before Hippocrates. You can find the the Kahun medical papyrus. Papyrus paper. Okay. A compendium of information about women's diseases and pregnancies in 1600 B.C. That's 1300 years before Hippocrates, the Edward C Smith papyrus a comparative surgical text and anatomical inquiry. It especially deals with the spinal column 1550. Let me jump to one here. The the the Ebers papyrus, a medical. There is a whole book on it. A medical paper by Queen Hatshepsut, the first known queen in history, an Egyptian queen, a papyrus designed to show women how to develop a method to stop pregnancy, to insert into the vagina made of the shrub of acacia and honey, which breaks down into lactic acid. Not only that, Monsanto, DuPont.
Lee Naves: So we're talking about birth control.
Dr. Ben: Birth control in 1550 B.C. by the Africans.
Lee Naves: It was a long before the pill.
Dr. Ben: A few days before the pill.
Dr. Simmons: Keep in mind that Europe is not yet in history.
Dr. Ben: Greeks ain't yet.
Lee Naves: All I ask. One at a time.
Dr. Simmons: This civilization, I began. I'm not written His Iliad and Odyssey.
Lee Naves: All the stuff that you're saying. You're saying we can find this?
Dr. Simmons: Say it's not here. It's either in Doc's library or mine. Back in New York. Nothing we take for granted all the.
Lee Naves: And you're saying they're not all written by black men?
Dr. Ben: No, Anacalypsis not. Anacalypsis is written. Look, now, Anacalypsis is a two volume work by Sir Godfrey Higgins, written in 1838 in England and published by Watson Company. The Golden Boat is a 13 volume book by Sir James Frazer, published simultaneously in the United States and England, and it was published in 1838. Bible Myths and the parallels in other religions written by Thomas W Domes and is published in 1887 by Watson Company, London, England. The Ruins of Empire by Kong Sia. Is published. There it is. It published in 1992 by by simultaneously in England and France. Done by a man who was Napoleon. With Napoleon Bonaparte.
Lee Naves: Let me just say this about that. If we just give you the benefit of the doubt and consider what you're saying to be true. I mean, you are chipping away at everything we've ever been taught. Most of what we believe.
Dr. Ben: Well, you were taught it as slaves.
Lee Naves: Slave?
Dr. Ben: Yes. We are no longer physical slave, but we are mental slaves. And this is the worst form of slavery. Some of us believe that the Cadillac and the house and the beach makes us free, but it's the mind that makes us free.
Lee Naves: I'm just glad I have to ask the questions. I don't have to spin any of this stuff. Going to something else for a minute. Tell us about some of those pictures because I want to get into this hour. .
Dr. Simmons: Well, this bookelt that you were looking at right here is the picture of the of Pope Saint Peter, the first pope of Roman Catholicism, as the church admits. But the church said that black face, black everything.
Dr. Ben: If you strip in black all the way down except his fingernails and all those things.
Lee Naves: How do I know you just didn't get a picture and paint a black face on it?
Dr. Simmons: That is a statue in Rome that you're looking at right now. Take a jet, take take the fastest meals and go to Rome and come back and tell us if it's not that same picture. I used to teach at Roman Catholic College, which is there now. Yes, now. And every every pope has to kiss his feet. Every pope kisses his stove. They said his stoves are warmed by the thousands of kisses placed there. If the book that I got it from was not that heavy, bring it. Let you see the pope kissing Pope John the 23rd kiss.
Lee Naves: What else you got there?
Dr. Simmons: Well what I have here some black saints, Saint Augustine. Some of you say that Saint Augustine, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Athanasius and Saint Ambrose, Black saints of the church. You have to remember that Christianity is called in Europe and by Europeans as the new religion. It was alien to Europe. Emperor Constantine is the one who decided to take it. He said, I need a religion to unify my empire with this religion. I could then conquer the world. And he himself was never a Christian until and his dying bed in the year 337 when he became converted to Christianity. But he took it to unify them.
Dr. Ben: Isn't it Augustine? In his unchristian doctrines, he wrote 48 different works. The last the three most noted in the West is his confessions, which he specified who he who he was, and then the holy city of God. And the last was on Christian doctrines. The Fundamental Principle for Modern Christianity. Three black women Felicita, Perpetua and Nympha were the first to die for Jesus Christ next. And they were from what is today called.
Lee Naves: How do you Know this?
Dr. Ben: It's in the documents of the church and it's in the writing of the church. And was it not Pope Melchisedek the three African popes of the Roman Catholic Church, Marchesa, Victor I, Miltiades, and Gelasius? We have them there. Now, these are church document. But remember when it became a time in 1506 after we lost power in Spain, the Africans ruled Spain from 711. We were calling ourselves Moors Uighurs, then Moors from 711 until 1485, 774 years when we built and brought into Europe the university system building the University of Salamanca, Salamanca in Spain, a copy of the University of Genoa from ancient Ghana, which was equally a copy of the University of Sankore in Tombouctou, which the French later called Timbuktu. Now these these look, if you want to read it, read Stanley Lane Poles, the Moors in Spain, written in 1887, or Alejandro Makasa read his book in Spanish The Moors in Spain, and said that even the bath was introduced by those Africans.
Lee Naves: You said the bra was introduced by.
Dr. Simmons: The bath, was reintroduced because Rome had a bad before, but they stopped because not understanding the Christian doctrine that the that the Europeans had embraced the stuff for over a thousand years from taking bath as a matter of fact that like to make mockery of the Queen, the Queen Victoria of England boasting of herself being the cleanest woman in all of Europe, taking one bath per month.
Dr. Simmons: I have books show you where people were made saints for boasting. They never even washed their hands. Saints of the church.
Lee Naves: Do you have a copy with dirt with you?
Dr. Ben: no. I didn't bring too many..
Lee Naves: Let me let me. Because you guys are bombarding us with so much. Just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do on a day to day basis?
Dr. Ben: Well, my name is Yosef Ben-jochannan. I teach at Cornell University a History and Egyptology. I am an author, former member of the United Nations, graduate with a PhD from Cambridge University in England, a PhD from the University of Barcelona in Spain. That should help. I originally was a civil engineer who turned to anthropology and history with a law degree and practiced law. Now that, you know, black people had to lower a little bit more to get a job. And I was I was born in Ethiopia and came to the Caribbean as a young fellow at age six. My mother is a Puerto Rican and we lived and grew up in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. My father was a barrister and I, as I said, worked with the United Nations and then finally started teaching at Columbia University and other places got fired a number of times. Of course.
Lee Naves: I imagine so.
Dr. Ben: Yes, with this kind of thing, they don't want with the documents in my hand when I expose that Planned Parenthood was nothing new, that it was done in Africa in in as early as 1550. I was fired on the spot by Professor Ralph Linton. But about ten years later, the American Medical Association published the Ebers Papyrus, the same thing I got fired for.
Lee Naves: I want to get back to something. One of your books in a minute, but just tell us. Our audience at home and studio audience a little bit about yourself.,
Dr. Simmons: I'm not as fortunate as Dr. Ben. Dr. Ben is the intellectual, so I like to be the other extreme. I like to say that my college is that of hard knocks, and I use myself as the example of as to how high a black man could come from, mother with mother, with in the sense that it is said that blacks are not intelligent. And so that what we do is compliment each other. He being the extreme with all the grease. And I will remain the little fella in the street. However, the little fella in the street have thought that some of your best colleges and taught the professors so that they could teach you. I've thought at Morris College. I've lectured for Yale. I have lectured most of your best institutions. I just went to do a week seminar out in the state of Washington to educate some professors how to teach and teaching and teaching logic. I think what happened, like some people say, Well, Simmons, why don't you go in and get the thing? I said, No, at my age, I'm not looking for prestige, but my children will and I. And since there is a thing that black people are dumb, I like to sit back being dumb and just waste the intellectual other folks away.
Dr. Ben: He's being very modest. He's my associate in my office. That's all right. And yes. And at Malcolm King College and was the chairman of the Department of History in many schools. So he's being modest.
Dr. Simmons: I am.
Lee Naves: Let's get back to some of this. Let me see that for a minute. Let's get back to some of this stuff you were talking about last night. You were talking about at dinner. You guys just took on the Bible.
Dr. Ben: Which one? There are many Bibles. You got about 3000 versions. And the most the one that most people here believe in is the King James version. And when version is not a fact, a version is something like the original. And James commission 47 men under Sir Francis Bacon. They he pulled them from Cambridge University, Oxford University, University of Eton and University of Scotland at Glasgow. Those 47 men wrote God's words.
Lee Naves: You're not going to be very popular in this area.
Dr. Ben: I didn't plan to be.
Lee Naves: Okay.
Dr. Ben: This quote from one of your books and this will be available to our studio audience and we'll talk about this a little bit after we get off the air. And I'm not even sure I should read this. This is from a Bible.
Dr. Ben: That's the Bible in this. You should read it. Read what was in Genesis up until the sixth century. It is telling the Book of Mormon's that the people in Salt Lake City, which many blacks have joined because they'll join the Ku Klux Klan as the open membership. It is still in the Calvinist teaching in South Africa and read what was in the Bible up until the sixth century.
Lee Naves: So are you saying that this is still in the Mormon Bible?
Dr. Ben: It's still in the Mormon Bible, It is still in the Calvinist Bible. And they look at the bottom where the Roman Catholic Church had it and they now make an excuse that they were sorry that it was ever in there. But nevertheless, it was.
Lee Naves: All right. Let me just share this with our audience here and our audience at home. And this is from one of Doctor Ben's books.
Lee Naves: Let me just share a little bit of it here because I want to get some reaction from you. And it's something for folks to think about. And you said this is from a Bible, therefore it must be Canon, your first born whom they enslaved. And I'm just starting in kind of the middle because there's a lot of it here. And since you have disabled me doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan's children shall be born ugly and black. Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks and their eyes red again because your lips jested at my misfortune there shall swell. And because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked. And the rest of this stuff is underlined. And this is a quote from the book Bible you say, And their male members shall be shamefully in elongated. Men of this race are called Negroes, their forefather Cain, and commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never to tell the truth.
Dr. Ben: That's right. It was in the Judeo-Christian Bible until the sixth century of the. Christian era, also called Add and AntiDomino. Some black ministers refer to it. Just a few weeks ago in New York, I was listening to my radio on one of these religious programs sponsored by a liquor store. And it says, the minister says that these young blacks are acting up. We shouldn't act up anyhow, because when all of us, when we die and we go to heaven, we're going to be white anyhow. So we say anything we remember that we did not know that Christianity came from Egypt, from Egypt, and that the first monastery was on the island of Philae, which is still there now, and that the Christianity went into Ethiopia and all of North Africa, where they had seven patriarchs and 27 bishops before the first one in Greece or Rome. We knew nothing about that. We didn't know up till now. You got black people sending missionaries to Africa, not knowing that the Coptic church is older than the Roman church. We still send missionaries. We still tell lies about Africans eating the missionaries. I wish we did eat the missionaries. Then we would have had no problem. But they we still got that. We still got roots. People thinking that Roots has something to do with history. When the man says a novel, people naming their children came to contain Kunta Kinte and all kind of thing. Now, with these.
Lee Naves: Do you take issue with that, you find something..
Dr. Ben: Yeah, It's garbage. It has nothing to do with history.
Lee Naves: Are you calling Roots, the most popular television show in the history?
Dr. Ben: Amos and andy was the most popular radio show, and it had nothing to do with black people who were two white Jews. Yeah, you know, that's the I told you, the worst part of our enslavement is not the shackle on the hand. It's the shackle on the mind. What we have been conditioned. Remember this, that the master slave master doesn't train his slave to be free. We once used to train ourselves when we had such things as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Baptist Church, the African newspaper, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and all these different people had churches where they taught the people their own history. Look, go into our churches and find out, do they sing the spirituals anymore? No, They got anthems from Scotland, from Germany. They don't sing the songs of the African people anymore in the churches. What's wrong with that? What's wrong? How does how does a song from Europe, from Scotland, relate to you? Your Scottish don't. You Could have fooled me.
Lee Naves: Suppose we believe. Not all of it. Just suppose we believe half of what you said here tonight. What difference is it going to make?
Dr. Ben: Quite a lot of difference. Your behavior, the behavior of the child. If you tell a child that all his ancestors and all his people before him ever was, and you prove it to him by not showing him anything that his people did, why would he feel good when you got busing Now everybody been fighting for bussing. So the bus goes, you show me one bus bringing one white kid from a white neighborhood into a black neighborhood to study all the busses go from the black neighborhood to the white neighborhood. Show me a class in music appreciation where they're showing you African music. It is European music alone now. It has an impact on the child. The problem that we are facing is that I say we ask, what's the difference? Okay, In the church tomorrow they're going to be a church and every one of the black churches got a white Jesus go into a Chinese church and see if you don't see Jesus got split like a Chinese go. You know what I mean? Go to everybody but us. Religion is the deification of a culture, and the gods look like the people talking about it. And the angels here you got Jesus. Now give me if you talk about image, December the 25th coming, you're going to see this. And before Jesus wrapped with swaddling bands, it says it Well, we're in the desert now. It's 110 degrees minimum Fahrenheit. We're in the desert and the child is wrapped in swaddling band wool. What? Mother's going to wrap her child in a wool blanket in the desert? Let's go further. And on the roof of the manger there is no if you you give your daughter an icicle and then tell her to take it back and put it in the oven with 110 degree Fahrenheit and go back to expect to find an icicle, you going to find running hot water. But that image is in our head. This is a European version that was painted by Michelangelo for Pope Julius II in 1509in the Sistine Chapel. He finished in 1511. An image, one picture that says worth a thousand words. Now you have three disciples, three, three wise men in the middle of the desert. One is from Africa, one is black. They said how this is how this Father Moses, born in Egypt and they show him in the book. You be born in Africa? Another one. The Angel of the Lord. Wait. No. The Angel of the Lord. Come to Mary and said to Mary, Carry the little boy and hide him among his cousins in Egypt. Because Herod wants to kill him. Right? He comes and she comes and take this child to Africa. Egypt is in Africa, hidden among his cousin. He's blond, he's blue eyed, and he's and he got golden hair and he's hidden among a bunch of black kids. The army came, the Navy came. Everybody searched every house and can't find that boy.
Lee Naves: Time is moving on. And there's so much here. Okay. Let me just throw this at you. I'm sure you've offended a lot of people's religion. There are those who say that would say or Sure, I'm thinking or sure. I'm sure they're thinking that what you're saying is just a lot of racist garbage.
Dr. Ben: Well they know they will say I'm reverse racist. They won't allow us to be plain racist. We have to be different. We're the reverse kind. Now people will say anything and even black people will say we will control our mind, our thinking. The point is this that the person said, have never read anything. Hardly. Let us go into the theologians library and see the amount of books they have. How many of these people have gone and traveled? You see what I'm saying? There is no major university, no major library in in Europe. I have never been to. There is no major library in Asia or Africa. I have never been to there is I have been to every one of the major tombs and temples of Egypt and got the pictures and read the hieroglyphs and everything like that.
Lee Naves: You even said you discovered England.
Dr. Ben: Tell people I. England when I was the first time I went to England, I discovered it. I was in the middle of London walking around, doing like this, looking around. And the Bobby, that's the policeman. He came and he says, What? What are you doing? I said, I'm discovering England. He says, You must be deaf. You know what that means? Crazy in English and how England have always been here. I says, Well, I'm doing the Columbus. I just came here. I'm the first. I'm the first of my people to come. So I got to discover it. They discover everything that they came to, isn't it? They discover the source of the Nile, whereas the African brought him. Show him the source of the Nile. Africans. They're having a nice bath. Naked. Naked. We were bathing very naked because what we got to hide, we were naked.
Lee Naves: But you claim that Africans invented the brassiere for women?
Dr. Simmons: The fact that they invented the brassiere as a string for the purpose of keeping the breast from jumping up and down, I mean, you know, it causes young men to burn when they see that. But the thing is, as though listening to Dr. Ben speaking about the European discovery, I thought about going to the moon, that the Europeans have not changed up till today. He still operates that way. Wherever he goes, the first thing he does is plant a flag. When the United States sent men to the moon, they didn't care if there were moon people up there. The first thing they did is put that flag. This belong to us and the Bible.
Dr. Ben: And ready to kill for it.
Lee Naves: Okay, putting aside charges of reverse racism, you guys are jumping at the beliefs of a lot of black folk. I mean, at dinner you shook up some people when you said that. Talk about black preachers.
Dr. Ben: Yeah but let me just ask you this. I mean, let's just say this. People believe, unfortunately, most black people here believe that the only religion black people ever had was Christianity or Judaism, Islam. They forget that the first known religion was the worship of Peter Pita along the Nile. There was no Adam and Eve mentioned anyplace yet because there was no Judaism. And if there is no Judaism, there is no book of Genesis. But you went.
Lee Naves: You went so far as to say that the virgin birth, Adam and Eve Noah.
Dr. Ben: Were all repetition and they could read the works of you said.
Lee Naves: They're myths?
Dr. Ben: All religion is myths. Religion is based upon belief.
Lee Naves: There are people who bet their lives that Jesus was born when people.
Dr. Ben: There are people dying to go into cemeteries. That doesn't make things stop. The way we were taught, as if there was no other religion but Judaism, Christianity or Islam. There are. There were religions and our religion way older than Judaism and Christianity. Let me jump that. The Africans did the religion of the worship of Olodumare. For example, among the Yoruba is more than 2000 years older than Christianity.
Lee Naves: Let me get to this, because time I see time is creeping up on us. Were sitting around the dinner table, some students and people and question came to you both the way you sound. You guys may not believe in God or something.
Dr. Ben: I am married to an ex-nun and I wrote a Roman Catholic nun. I drive her to, 35 years we've been married a few days ago, and I drive her to church on occasion. I'll go in and listen. I'll go to the mosque. I'll go to the Buddhist temple. I go to anybody's religion because religion is a belief Nobody has it. Now, you ask if I am believing in God, you must first explain. Because I met the guy that robbed my house. Believe in God. He had a big cross on his chest when they caught him and the priest. And he believed that didn't stop him from robbing my house. Believing in God won't make you good or bad. The Ku Klux Klan believe in God. The one thing that they say that they have established a religion to protect the name of Jesus. So read the whole philosophy. The most of the people in the Bible Belt will cut your throat for being black. Did the Bible stop them from being racist? No, that don't mean a thing because you believe you believe in your behavior. Two different things. And people ask you believe in God. You don't believe in God. So what that mean? It doesn't mean I won't cut your throat. Okay.
Lee Naves: But you said earlier that if we stop paying black preachers tomorrow morning.
Dr. Ben: Church will close. Well, many of them come in to do volunteer work. It's a business. There's a salary. People get out of it, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or what.
Lee Naves: Christianity and religion as we know it is a business?
Dr. Ben: Biggest business. It's bigger than AT&T.
Dr. Simmons: Get all kinds of break tax breaks and all kinds of privileges. When you're the minister.
Dr. Ben: The salary is paid. You think the pope will be there If he didn't get a big salary? He gets the biggest salary of all. Do you think? No. Let's face it. How many ministers, you know, doing it for free? Just tell me.
Dr. Ben: If you don't pay your 10% tithing and see how if you're going to get buried, then leave your corpse. It may come to the undertaker parlor and say a few words, but do not come into the cemetery. You sing in the choir all you want and going to get married and see if you have to pay.
Lee Naves: What do we learn from all this? How are we to change our lives? How will it change our lives for the better?
Dr. Ben: I am not against anyone believing in a God system. To the contrary, I do believe in God system a system. But what I'm against is that for African people and by the way, you Africans, you know, you may not know that, but just remember, if you get a rabbit and put it in an oven and the next day you go in there and it has little, little ones, you don't call them biscuits. And if Africans come to America and got little babies, they are Africans. Okay. I know you don't like that when you look in the mirror because you can't think you're an African. But anyhow, I have no objection at all. My children. I have a daughter who's a Jehovah Witness. I have.
Lee Naves: Does that bother you?
Dr. Ben: No it don't bother me, because I train my children and I know what they believe and don't believe. And in fact, of her being a Jehovah Witness when when, when problems strike, it's Big daddy they come into. I know that. And my daughter was trained to be intelligent that you don't pray to stop getting pregnant. You have to do something about that. You got to go. You got to go either to the drugstore or a gynecologist. You pray all you want. If you having a man, the praying won't stop the pregnancy, you understand? But birth control will. Okay? The pill will help. Now, that's the reality. I'm not going to tell my daughter you believe in God. If you got a man pray and the boy will make you pregnant.
Lee Naves: Okay, but can of a specific example. People who may be physically ill would not go to the doctor. I'm thinking of one particular instance that I know about, right? Lady would not go to the doctor because she said she'd rather be in church.
Dr. Ben: She going to die soon. I will not want a minister when I get hit by a car. I want a specialist in bones.
Dr. Simmons: Let me take you for a moment. Let me take you use myself for an example. I was bleeding to death. I was going to die. I was losing blood faster than the doctors could give me. And they said we must operate. And there comes a priest to say something over me. Whatever it is, I tell him, I don't need him. I don't need him. I want a doctor.
Dr. Ben: That's right. That's intelligence.
Dr. Simmons: He's standing in the way of the doctors. They need to work in me.
Dr. Ben: It doesn't mean that he doesn't believe in God. It means that he's intelligent. And this is 1960. Because the priests want the same doctor. If the priest had an accident and the doctor comes up and another priest come up and when he look and he has a ruptured aorta or something like that, you think he's going to tell the guy, pray, man, I need that. And tell the doctor, Go on, tell the doctor, get me to the hospital. When you go to the hospital, how many how many priests, ministers you don't see lying up there getting treated because they got sense. You don't mean it isn't religious or godly. For me to say I got a broken I fell down and broke my leg. And then I say, Father, straighten it out. You know what the Bible said? I will help those who help themselves. What? The Bible could be used for negative and positive. They got all kind of negative and positive in the whole thing. Is your interpretation of it. You go to 15 Baptist Church and you get 15 Baptist. Why tell me now? If it's religion that you got one block, 200ft long and got six Baptist church in there, the same Baptist denomination. Tell me why. Tell me why. If you're a Christian, why you need a methodist, a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Catholic. And it's the same Jesus. Why money, big business. Everybody wants to run their thing. If I get 10% from you, 10% for the next guy, 10% of $70,000 a year is good. Good. I mean, I could get a few Cadillacs behind that and a nice home and a nice wife with a mink coat. And you see some people taking the last dollar and give it to the church and then come and ask me for my dollar.
Lee Naves: Let me just because I've been informed that we have about, I guess, less than five minutes, maybe three minutes. We've covered a lot of subjects. We've had a lot of questions. And I guess in just maybe a minute summary, each of you, I mean, we hear about this stuff maybe once a month. Black History Month, and we go back for the other 11 living our lives, being bombarded with other kinds of information. What can we take from you and what can we do with it and how can it help us? I mean, that's a multifaceted question. But if you can let me start with you, Doctor.
Dr. Simmons: What I would say is that I would advise anyone to start reading and researching and their own, because I don't know of any school that educates. I've been trying to find a school that does all of them as far as I find out, all they do is train people to be a bunch of regurgitators. So I say to my students that you have to go out and take that training that you receive and then make it work for the benefit of yourself and your people. And then you show me that you are one who are now happen to be an educated individual. So you have to keep reading and it will benefit you in the long run.
Lee Naves: Is there any value to what we've been doing here for the last hour?,
Dr. Simmons: Yes, because now we have brought a tremendous amount of new information, hopefully to light and other people have started trying to check us out and then they, too, will become enlightened. We hope that they do try to prove us wrong.
Lee Naves: But you probably also offended a lot of folks.
Dr. Simmons: Well look, new knowledge does if someone tells you that your girlfriend that you love so well is a prostitute and you never seen a prostitute. And it's shocking. And if you catch her, you really can't believe it. You might even kill the guy for telling you. So I'm not surprised if it hurts, because when you start to change or deal with people's belief patterns that they have held on so dearly to and many have even offered to fight, give up their lives for their belief, only to find that their belief is untrue
Lee Naves: We just have a minute left and I know that's not a lot of time, but final statement on your part, Dr. Ben.
Dr. Ben: God is truth, they said. And truth is a constant effort of research. There is no limit to truth, and one must look constantly to find truth. I've traveled this entire world. I didn't sit one spot and read one book. I went to thousands of libraries over the age. I'm 64 and I've been from 1938. I have been doing research in the area of African people.
Lee Naves: Think you've been making any progress, making any difference in people's lives.
Dr. Ben: Progress is a relative thing. It all depends on what you equate it from, what point to where. We have made any progress if you look at percentage wise. At the college campus we are now professors, let's say, we've got five professors in 1000 students. One time we had no professor in 100 students. It doesn't make any difference. The percentage is worse now.
Lee Naves: Okay we're out of time and we want to thank those of you at home and those of you here in the studio. If you'll stick around, we'll talk a little bit more. But we hope you found something very interesting and stimulating.
