THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
H I S T O R Y N O T E S
|
DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON
AND THE WONDERFUL ETHIOPIANS OF THE ANCIENT CUSHITE EMPIRE
DEDICATED TO SISTER KEFA NEPTHYS |
THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
H I S T O R Y N O T E S
Photo Courtesy of Thabiti AsukileDRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON
AND THE WONDERFUL ETHIOPIANS OF THE ANCIENT CUSHITE EMPIRE
DEDICATED TO SISTER KEFA NEPTHYS
"Out of anthropology, ethnology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, as well as history, I have dug up an irrefutable arsenal of facts that Harvard or Yale or cowardly scholarship in our race dare not refute. How can a leadership point the forward way that is utterly ignorant of the past?"
DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON
Race woman, teacher, journalist and historian, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, who has earned a high-ranking place in the struggle to redeem Africa's role in world history, was born in Winchester, Virginia in 1876. She was the daughter of John William and Lydia Taylor Dunjee, and spent most of her life in the American Southwest, principally Oklahoma and Arizona. Drusilla's father, John William Dunjee, was an educator, church building missionary and fund raiser for the American Baptist Home Mission Society. He is principally credited with instilling in young Drusilla a strong sense of ethnic identity and "race pride." Visits to the Houston home by her father's close colleagues included such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Blanch K. Bruce. As a young woman she lived with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota before settling down in Oklahoma.
At the age of twenty-two Drusilla married Price Houston--a storekeeper eleven years her senior. Together they bore a daughter. In McAlester, Oklahoma she opened the McAlester Seminary--an educational institution which she maintained for a dozen years. In Oklahoma City Houston worked with her brother Roscoe Dunjee (1883-1965), the editor of The Black Dispatch--an Oklahoma City weekly newspaper.
As a journalist, Houston aggressively covered numerous cases of white atrocities against the Black citizens of Oklahoma. But it is as a bold and uncompromising historian that Houston comes to our attention here. Reading The Negro by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois (published in 1915) inspired her to research African people and their contributions to the world's civilizations. Indeed, Houston has been identified as "the earliest known Black woman to author a multivolume study of the history of ancient Africa and its people."
THE WONDERFUL ETHIOPIANS
Houston's crowning achievment was the publication of the Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, Book I: Nations of the Cushite Empire. Marvelous Facts From Authentic Records. Wonderful Ethiopians was originally published in 1926 in Oklahoma City by the Universal Publishing Company, and was intended as the first volume of a three volume set. Wonderful Ethiopians is a pioneering work that not only contains comprehensive chapters devoted to ancient African civilizations along the Nile, but continues the ethnographic survey into Asia where it examines and illuminates the strong African influences on classical Asian civilizations. Houston looks extensively at the African background to European civilizations and even ponders the role of Africans in ancient America.
Wonderful Ethiopians was favorably reviewed in a number of newspapers by Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, in the Amsterdam News by Joel Augustus Rogers, and in the Pittsburgh Courier by Robert L. Vann. Schomburg (1874-1938), the brilliant bibliophile, noted that:
"I can assure everyone that the author must have used considerable oil in her lamp represented by her exhaustive research, the indefatigable labor that resulted in the astonishing compilation before me...We are indebted to Drusilla D. Houston for this illuminating and comprehensive book."
Joel Augustus Rogers (1883-1966), himself a tremendous historian, journalist and scholar, recommended that "The Wonderful Ethiopians be placed in every Negro home and school in the land." Robert L. Vann emphasized that "We know of no book published in the last 25 years which offers such reputable inspiration to the Black people of the earth." A. Philip Randolph's newspaper The Messenger commented that:
"Mrs. Houston has done what few other Negro authors have had the necessary patience and perserverance to do...She has delved deep into the...past to show that the literature, art, music, religion and customs of the Greeks and the early torch bearers of civilization were all permeated and influenced by the Ethiopians."
Houston was also the author of a syndicated column entitled the "Wondrous History of the Negro" and for years she was a feature writer for the Associated Negro Press. On April 11, 1937 in historic St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal church in St. Louis, Missouri, before a packed audience she gave an address entitled "The Negro Woman in a Changing Social Order." Her presentation was described as "one of the most profound and illuminating addresses ever heard in St. Louis."
After a remarkable life, on February 2, 1941, in Phoenix, Arizona Drusilla Dunjee Houston succumbed to tuberculosis. At the time of her death she was working on another book on African history. The last years of her were spent in relative seclusion, and until recently Wonderful Ethiopians itself seemed destined for obscurity. Fortunately, however, in 1985 William Paul Coates of Black Classic Press in Baltimore, Maryland reprinted Wonderful Ethiopians in its entirety, supplemented with an excellent introduction, afterword and commentary by Coates, Asa G. Hilliard III and James G. Spady, respectively.
SOURCE:
Wonderful Ethiopians Of The Ancient Cushite Empire, by Drusilla Dunjee Houston
Also see: DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON AND THE WONDERFUL ETHIOPIANS OF THE ANCIENT CUSHITE EMPIRE
and DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON (1876-1941)
and ANCIENT ETHIOPIANS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
and GREAT HABSHIS IN ETHIOPIAN/INDIAN HISTORY
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Revised: April 24, 2002.
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