[Course Book for Sessions on African and African American History]

[Philadelphia, PA]: [Pan African Federation Organization], 1978. Very good. 11¼" x 9¼" black vinyl commercial three-ring album. Pp. [185] + 5 pages of handwritten quiz questions laid in. Very good: album chipped at two corners and lightly mottled; some scattered small stains and light edgewear; some pages printed lightly or crooked, as issued; one page loose at bottom ring and a few reinforced at an earlier date.

This is a binder documenting an obscure course in African and Black American history that was produced by a little-known Philadelphia group, the Pan African Federation Organization (PAFO). The materials reveal a deeply moving effort to advance Black Americans' knowledge of African culture, replete with an attending student's copious underlining and manuscript notations.

There is very little online evidence to be found on PAFO, which was incorporated in Philadelphia in 1978. Two sources reported people earning a "bachelor of historical education" from PAFO, the group gave a presentation on Black history at an AME church in Philadelphia in 1984, and there were brief mentions of membership in newspaper accounts as late as 2010. An introduction found in this binder, dated September 1978, was signed "Napendo Ulinzi Milele" which translates in Swahili to "Love Security Eternity." This motto was found in only one other location: the cover of a book entitled The Journey of the Songhai People, which was co-authored by brothers Calvin R. and Edward W. Robinson and first published by PAFO in 1987. One section of the present course book (mentioned below) strongly alludes to the Robinsons being its authors.

Dr. Edward W. Robinson was born in 1918. He served as Pennsylvania's executive deputy secretary, executive director of Philadelphia's Minority Business Council, and was the first African American to be appointed a member of the Board of Directors of the city's Federal Reserve Bank. Also an attorney and educator, Robinson is credited with the infusion of African history as mandatory curriculum into the Philadelphia public high school system. His mission, in his words, was "to effect a positive change of attitude toward the ancestral value of people of African descent by the total world society through dramatically exposing the beauty, grandeur and sophistication of ancient Egypt and the Songhai Empire." He produced the 1970 spoken word history album Black Rhapsody and wrote scripts for seven motion pictures. His younger brother Calvin self-published four books on African history, and the two co-hosted a radio show called The Elders Speak from 1990 to 2000.

This binder contains a nineteen-section crash course situated at the intersection of Pan-African and Black American history. Introductory materials include the text of a 1973 speech by Philadelphia Representative David Richardson on the Capital Punishment Bill, the lyrics to James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and a list of books sourced for the course, including works by Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. DuBois, Daniel Chu and Elliott Skinner. On the verso of this bibliography is a handwritten list of additional references. The authors also listed PAFO's "Purposes and Goals," which included "To recreate in the minds of our people the glory, the pomp, the splendor and the honor that was ours in a land far away from where the kidnappers carried us" and "To develop an intertwining philosophy based on the culture of the Songhai Empire, and out of the experiences of the degradation suffered on this American soil." They pointed out that:

"In this approximately 66,000 word digest, we are merely trying to present the essence of our Black past, Western African . . . We hope that as you read and study this text, that in spite of all the tactical maneuvers projected by the white power structure against Black people's thrust for self determination, manhood and dignity, that somehow we shall overcome it."

Most of the course sessions ranged from about two to ten pages long, though one 45-page section focused on the "Background of the Brainwash Against Black Peoples" and enumerated various theories on evolution, speciation and brain composition. There were copies of two hand-drawn diagrams, one a chart of chronological time and one on the composition of skin and hair. It detailed the "advantages of melanin," also revealing its authors: "Dr. Ed. Robinson and Calvin Robinson's grandmother, a gorgeously richly pigmented lady, had fewer wrinkles at age ninety-one than those of us less richly pigmented descendants had at thirty years of age."

About 20 pages were dedicated to "The Value of History," mainly centered on William Leo Hansberry's contributions to African American education. Other sessions concerned ancient African civilizations, the development of the Western Sudan, "Songhai's Beginning" and a two-part session on its expansion. The course veered through the fall of the Songhai Empire, "the Middle Passage and the Triangular Trade," and "the unmitigated pressures to destroy our Black Family during our bondage." It argued that "the white world conspired against us, with one concern and that was to forever keep us in servitude (for their profit)" and that "our flesh financed the entire Industrial Revolution." One session detailed examples of "Our Fathers and Mothers in Revolt Against Their Captors" in Jamaica, Haiti and on the American mainland. Later sessions covered the "Period of The Black Reconstruction," in which "Blacks took steps towards oneness," through to the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. There was also a segment on "Post-Reconstruction Freedom Fighting" groups and leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, the Niagara Movement, NAACP and the Urban League. The final session, "The Spirit of Nationalism," conveyed an African proverb: "Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse." It bewailed that "the total society has been historically programmed to loath our pre-Colonial African culture and to loath the genetic pool from which we were produced," and argued that "Black people must unite to change the image and the values by the study of themselves from the beginning of our culture."

A rare, impactful and thorough reflection on African and Black American history, intended to enlighten the modern African American population. No holdings were located in OCLC nor any evidence found of its existence online.