[42] Ibid., 131.

[43] “The Genius of Universal Emancipation,” 1. 142; 5. 409.

[44] “The Genius of Universal Emancipation,” 4. 76, 142; Birney, “James G. Birney,” 77; Minutes of the American Convention of Abolition Societies, 1826, p. 48.

[45] “The Genius of Universal Emancipation,” 11. 65, 66.

[46] See The Minutes and Proceedings of the American Convention of Abolition Societies, covering this period.

[47] This statement is based on the accounts of a number of abolitionists.

[48] Adams, “A Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery,” 60, 61.

[49] Siebert, “The Underground Railroad,” 10. 346.

[50] Ambler, “Sectionalism in Virginia,” 107-108.

[51] Woodson, “The Education of the Negro,” 120-121.

[52] “The Genius of Universal Emancipation,” 5. 117, 126, 164, 188, 275, 301, 324, 365; 6. 21, 140, 177.

[53] The Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1837, p. 48; The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841, p. 31.

[54] Ibid.

[55] The African Repository, XXXII, 16.

[56] The Catalogue of Berea College, 1897.

ANTAR, THE ARABIAN NEGRO WARRIOR, POET AND HERO

That men of Negro blood should rise to distinction in Arabia is not at all singular.  By language and ethnological conformation the people of the Arabian Peninsula belong to the great Semitic group of the human family.  But the proximity of Africa to Arabia carried the slave trade at a very early period to that soil.  Naturally, as a result of intermarriage, thousands of Negroes with Arabian blood soon appeared in that part of Asia.  This was especially true of the midland and southern districts of the peninsula.  To-day, after several centuries of such unions, there is found in southwestern Arabia, in northern and central Africa an ever-increasing colored population of vast numbers, known as Arabised Negroes.  Many of these have become celebrities whose achievements form an integral part of Arabian civilization and Mohammedan culture.[1] Emerging from this group came Antar, the most conspicuous figure in Arabia, a man noble in thought, heroic in deed, an exemplar of ideals higher than those of his age and a model for posterity.

Antarah ben Shedad el Absi (Antar the Lion, the son of the Tribe of Abs), the historic Antar, was born about the middle of the sixth century of our era, and died about the year 615.  Some accounts give the year 525 as the date of his birth.  By Clement Huart, a distinguished Orientalist, he is described as a mulatto.[2] “Goddess born, however,” says Reynold A. Nicholson, “he could not be called by any stretch of the imagination.  His mother was a black slave."[3] All authorities agree that Shedad, his father, was a man of noble blood and that his mother was an Abyssinian slave.