“Monday Morning History” Welcome Back Professor Bob Harvey (Hour 1)

This is a good recording, man.

I can dig it.

Good morning and welcome to the early show As always you can join us at 855-752-4842 that's 855-752-4842 You can text us at that same number.

Good morning to you.

Cardi.

How you doing man?

Pretty good pretty good talking to mr. Bob Harvey We're gonna have on the air today with you

All right, so you got him, that's great.

Yeah, I got him, I got him.

Oh, he's gonna be logging in in the minute.

He said he was having phone issues and whatnot.

Okay, well, that's great, man.

I just want to say, we've got a great show lined up for you this morning.

If you can tell, my voice is a little strained because I'm a part of just a great production company called Capita Productions.

And we had, we actually did four shows this weekend.

Capital Productions is a wonderful, wonderful troupe with live music, singing, dance, you know, just a masterful, masterful performance and sort of 25, 2025 edition.

of capital productions.

We have the drum kit off this pass.

We can actually, we began it last Wednesday and Thursday.

We did two shows for 2,400 students and we did a show on Friday night, two shows Saturday and then we did a four o'clock matinee yesterday.

And we're gonna follow that up this week with two more shows.

Tuesday and Wednesday for 2400 more students and then another show Thursday.

I mean, Friday evening.

Two more shows Saturday and culminated all with a the last show on Sunday and I will tell you.

You know, those those young people who performed and all the.

You know, musicians and singers.

Kudos and all the people who put the play together.

They've been working since last September.

And that's the quality of our play, the lighting, the sound, just par excellence.

And so thanks to everybody from Capital Production for a wonderful, wonderful weekend and all of the people in the community who showed up.

Thank you all.

So anyway.

And without any further ado, I want to welcome back the one and only Professor Bob Harvey.

He's certainly back with much claim.

There are many people who wanted to hear Professor Bob Harvey once again.

So Professor Harvey, welcome back and thank you for accepting the invitation.

Thank you, Bob.

You know, Professor Harvey.

You're, you're in sunny Charlotte, North Carolina.

You know, it's going to be 50 degrees in Milwaukee today.

It must mean it must be a hundred and Charlie

ought to be 63.

So we've had, we've had cold weather down

here.

Wait a minute.

You're calling 63

cold.

put my thermals on when it gets 69 and below.

Well, you know, you couldn't have survived up here last week.

We had 10 days, sub zero.

Hey, I survived up there for 38 years.

Including the cross.

So I didn't like it.

So, but, but anyway, Professor Harvey, you know, we had just agreed.

conversation on last week.

And so what you did, basically we're going to pick up where we left off.

We were actually talking about the history of our sojourn here in America, how we got here, what the process was, and we can pick it up from there, Professor Harvey.

I think at towards the end, we were talking about, you know, how

the Catholics saw what was taking place with the enslavement of blacks in this country, and they finally came out publicly and started talking about it.

We can begin there.

Well, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI of the Catholic Church proposed what he called a bull of demarcation.

And then the church issued a papal move dividing the world in half, down the Atlantic Ocean, between Spain and Portugal, the two top and strongest Catholic nations.

And the reason they did that was that Spain and Portugal were starting to compete with the new discoveries in the new world, especially in South America.

and also the newly found treasures along the coast of West Africa.

And so to keep the two countries from fighting and going to war with each other, another reason why is because keep in mind that from 750 AD to 1492, the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, which is Spain and Portugal, had been occupied by

North Africans known as the Moors.

If you know the story of Othello, that's part of what it's dealing with.

So North African Moors, those African Muslims occupied the southern half of the peninsula for almost 700 years.

And so it was, they were finally kicked out around 14 between 1491 and 1492 by

You know armies under the control and under the support of the Catholic Church And so the pope wanted to make sure that his two most powerful nation states did not Go to war and weaken themselves and possibly be conquered again And I always teach that love teach that lecture to my classes over the years because it let people know

that, you know, of the African connection.

For example, at one time, the Iberian Peninsula, the future country of Spain and Portugal, were occupied by another African group, the Carthaginians.

Carthage is located in modern-day Tunisia.

It's the home of Hannibal.

They had conquered that region and driven the Romans out.

And so they had occupied Spain with a colony of Carthage for several centuries before the Punic Wars finally drove them out.

And so there is an African connection to it.

Blacks were already in Spain in Portugal long before the slave trade started.

Some were free, others were slaves.

So there's a hit that's why I say when you start talking about the 16 19 project It is beautiful information and beautiful work from what I've seen But it overlooks some of the other important history and contribution that Africans made To the new world including the discoveries of the new world You know, so that's an important history.

There's another one that

I never did a lot of research on, but sometime around the 13th century AD, we find that there were possibly millions from the Kingdom of Mali.

That was one of the powerful West African kingdoms.

The Kingdom of Mali actually set a fleet of ships to

And supposedly they came to the New World.

Now, one of the evidence that they link with that is that they landed somewhere around the Yucatan Peninsula.

And if you're knowing the thing about the Yucatan Peninsula, there's a, in southern Mexico, there are some large stone heads called the Olmic culture stone heads.

They have wide nose thick lips.

and comb resistant hair.

Now, where did they come from?

Did the Malayan fleet actually make it to the New World?

We don't know.

But there's a theory about that, just like there's one dealing with the settlement along the coast of Peru and in other regions of the southwestern part of South America.

That there was it called a papyrus theory the Egyptians who was excellent seafarers Travel and managed to make it there.

And that's why you have step pyramids built by the Inca in that region I mean it's some fascinating history out there that that's lost Earl because no one has bothered to pursue those those ideas and those theories

But it's just something to throw out there and all we have as a result of that are those stonehead statues and we know about the pyramids that were built by the Inca and apparently the Maya and Aztec in Mexico and the Toltec cultures also Benefitted from that.

So there's some fascinating history there to see that long before the Mayflower Africans

had already been in other parts of the world.

And that's the important

history.

You know, Professor Harvey, that is really eye-opening because, you know, that's certainly not the history that's been taught in this nation and the fact that in order for Africans to be able to transform or get to other parts of the world, they had to have built ships.

There weren't airplanes.

And so they had to be some of the first people, I guess, in order to move outside of their continent, to be able to build ships to sail to get to those continents.

Is that correct?

But Earl, there's another African connection.

Professor,

hang on one second.

8-5-5-7-5-2-48-42.

I am, once again, just excited to have the one and only professor.

Bob Harvey, who is a historian of African American history, you know, African history, and all sorts of other histories.

He's with us once again, 855-752-4842 on a Motown Monday on the Earl Ingram Show.

you

to a Motown Monday on The Earl Ingram Show.

As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.

Text us at that same number.

Once again, I'm joined by the one and only Professor Bob Harvey all the way from sunny Charlotte, North Carolina.

And certainly we're talking once again, if you don't know, I had Professor Harvey on last week.

He lit up the airways as he always does.

And so I'm excited that he was accepted invitation to come back.

He is a historian, American history, African history and, and, you know, all sorts of other things.

So it is an honor to have him back on the airways.

But that's how we, before we went to break, I was asking you about the fact that, you know, that Africans in order for them to leave

you know, that where they were, they had to build ships and and travel across the oceans and the seas.

And that's not kind of what I was taught.

I mean, I was taught that, you know, people traveled to Africa and, you know, that's how Africans left their shores and were able to move across the world.

But you say it's different.

Well, Errol, take a look at if anyone knows anything about the NASA Geographic and world history.

You know, how did the people in New Guinea, thousands of miles away, they're black.

You know, they're just like some of the black folk on the continent.

How did they get there?

They didn't start to get on those skis and ski across.

You know, how did they get there?

But it goes back even deeper than earlier all about 10 years, what's 15 years ago?

I started teaching because I started doing research and I was fascinated by the works of the leaky family Richard leaky Louis leaky and of course Richard leaky and Mike Mary leaky Their family who were both British and Kenya subject

And the worst of Johansson and others, dealing with the origin of man.

Now scholars have finally accepted the fact that mankind originated in Africa.

And I don't care what color they are, but I do know that if you stay near the sun long enough, things change.

You just change.

I mean, I was shocked when I first went into the service and trained down at Fort Benin, Georgia.

You're doing this in the summer doing that infantry training for 13 weeks When I would roll back my my sleeves and roll them up And I'm and I'm more like chocolate brown.

So if you hang that day after the Sun, you're gonna change colors It's just that's the way your Melanie's going to go and kick in you.

You're gonna get dark So you have this history when you start studying, you know

prehistoric primates like Australopithecus, you know, Azizionthropus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, all of those were early primates that were the forerunner of man.

And when you start explaining my grandfather, I don't know whether you'd never figured out whether he was a Garveyite or what, but

He believed that the Garden of Eden was found in Africa.

And when I would ask my grandfather the question, he died in 1960, but I was in the sixth and seventh grade and I was fascinated by what he was saying because I heard a couple of his sermons because it was about the preacher.

And Papa would always, you know, say that the Garden of Eden was in Africa.

Now I'm not trying to still in about his history, but.

His thing was, you got all those animals out, and when you get old enough, son, and you start doing more reading, you find out where the largest collection of animals are in the world, the largest variety.

And yet we have them all over the world, but they're located, the largest numbers are located right there in Africa, especially West Africa.

So there was a fascinating thing that I was pushed at an early age.

that we couldn't study in high school because they didn't teach it in high school.

When they talk about woke, getting rid of the woke ideology and DEI, what they're really telling you is, let's go back to the day to jump from when we didn't even talk about it.

The state of North Carolina has already drafted up a preliminary history book that tries to hide anything that Africa did positive other than to produce slaves.

That's where they're going.

They're trying to put a good face on slaves.

They're trying to say that they will happen.

They're going back to the days of UB Phillips, one of the renowned Southern historians who'd like to think that black people would just have to go lucky at having a good time.

Ignoring the fact that between the 15th century when blacks first got here, in fact, when they were on the boat, coming over, they resisted.

And when you read Herbert Aztec as American Negro slavery votes, and other works that talk about the slave rebellion, that confrontation is black and white by their own Bennett.

You begin to see.

that this was not an easy affair and that they fought every step of the way.

Professor Harvey, hang on.

And they were fighting coming over here, and when they got here, they continued to fight.

Professor Harvey, hang on one second.

855-752-4842, 855-752-4842, the indomitable Professor Bob Harvey on the Earl Ingram Show, a Motown Monday on the Earl Ingram Show.

you

show.

As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.

That's 855-752-4842.

You can text us at that same number.

It's Monday.

That means a Motown Monday.

I'm joined once again by the one and only Professor Bob Harvey all the way from Sunday Charlotte, North Carolina.

Professor Harvey, let me.

We got to call it as bring him on quickly and then we'll let you respond.

Hey, good morning to you, brother.

Call it.

How you doing, sir?

You have a question to comment.

Hello.

I would like to ask you a question.

This is the black history money.

You have limited time.

I'm like.

There was an NFL halfway show, country of the mind made a statement.

He mentioned the 40 acres in a mule is more than music.

Are you familiar with that history and the details surrounding that?

Yes, sir.

The 40 acres in a mule was a concept that was put forward by a Republican.

Congressman at the close of the American Civil War.

And this was during the time of what's called Reconstruction, a period that lasted from roughly, some to 1869, but I go all the way back to 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery and gone all the way up until about 1890.

Now, during that time period, what Republicans were saying,

was that if they could give black folks, most of the black folk at that time had been enslaved with their new agriculture, that if they were given 40 acres of land and amused under the clouds of land, that they could take care of themselves and it would need a whole lot of federal support or state support for that matter to help rebuild the South.

So, and the other reason I wanted to do that was there were too many blacks heading up north and a lot of those northern Republican politicians didn't want that.

Remember, proud to the Civil War and leading all the way up until pretty much the 1970s, the Democratic Party had a monopoly on the political structure in the South.

And during the reconstruction period, Southern Republicans, Northern Republicans knew that.

And they felt that the only way to create a Republican political party in the South was to empower Black folks.

And what they were talking about were Black men.

Because remember the 15th Amendment of 1870.

gave black men the right to vote.

It didn't give white women the right to vote, or women, period.

It just gave black men the right to vote.

And since most black folk lived in the South at the time, the Republicans saw a chance to gain power in the South.

And one of the ways to do it was to keep them down, they're tied to the land.

And that's where the whole thing about the 40 acres of the mew came from.

And the question was, where do you get the land from?

And that thing was taken from slaveholders who owned all that land and had slavery prior to the war.

That's the way to break their back.

Take away their land, and you've already taken away their slaves.

So it was an economic and a political move to break the back of the people that had caused the Civil War.

Southern white

did it ever happen professor harvey did they ever live up to it?

Did they ever give the 40

acres in one or two cases in some cases dealing with you know with the with the with the federal government and if and if the Bureau they had a they would establish a bureau to to rehabilitate into it to To go ahead and bring in blacks into the economic fold in the south there were some who did get it but

Many of them are lost their land eventually They also had a program whereby they could they could they found land that was just left vacant and Conquered by the Union Army and they allowed blacks to get the game by that land by that land because you remember some blacks who had served in the Civil War Many of them, you know had earned the salary

And there was a group of organization called the Freedmen's Bureau.

And the Freedmen's Bureau set up black banks, helped set up schools, but they also had to set up economic plans to help incorporate blacks into the country.

And the way to do that was to get land for them.

So in some cases, they did get it.

In others, they allowed them to find land that was vacant.

whether the master had been killed off or driven off or whatever, and they were allowed to go in there and bribe some of that

land.

But certainly by the turn of the century, most of that land had been taken back over by Southern whites.

So if you're just joining us, my guess is the one and only Professor Bob Harvey.

Brother Collett was asking the question, Professor Harvey, because he said that when they were... Go ahead, Brother Collett, explain why.

You asked that question.

Well, one reference was made that after President Lincoln was assassinated, the president that came after him, became manipulated and had a lot of the settlers that were thriving to

uh, sell the land and build, uh, their army, uh, places of, uh, being able to stay, uh, was systematically taken away

by the president that came after the assassination of Lincoln.

That's, that's the point he's trying to get to.

Whether or not that is true.

Professor Harvey, did we lose

you?

He was interfering with the federal policy.

The radical Republicans in Congress are the ones who pushed the agenda to empower blacks in the South and to break the back of the political monopoly that the Democratic Party had on the South.

The only way to do that is to empower black men.

And so, yeah, there was some land that was given out, and Johnson tried to stop it.

You remember, Johnson succeeded him, but Johnson was from the South.

He was from Tennessee.

And Lincoln, the reason Lincoln got him as his vice president for the second term is because he was trying to find a way to unite the nation.

Had Lincoln lived, Lincoln would have never approved the 14th Amendment, and he certainly wouldn't have approved the 15th Amendment, and he would not have approved

giving that land at 40 acres of the mule.

Lincoln was opposed to any of that.

And he was opposed to most citizenship, which was granted by the 14th Amendment.

Lincoln was opposed to that because he felt that blacks were not sophisticated enough to be citizens.

Now he granted certain people like Frederick Douglass, even Harriet Tublin, and

Blacks who had served in the military, which was 186,000 strong, 186,000 African-American soldiers fought in the Civil War.

38,000 of them died.

22 of them were awarded the Medal of Honor for valor.

So Lincoln felt that if you were here, had been in the military, and 25% of the Union Navy, which was quite large at the time, were Black.

So those individuals who served,

Lincoln felt in certain select blacks educated, he felt that they could be given citizenship.

Well, for most black folk, Lincoln had no plans.

I'm not saying he didn't believe that they should under his breath, but he had no plans to make it into citizenship.

So that's in contradiction to what has been taught.

What has been taught is that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and I

remember.

This is what he issued an approximation, and it was really an executive order.

A proclamation, he just proclaimed them.

But proclamation didn't mean a damn thing, because all the Confederates, Confederates deal with giving the bird and telling them to go to hell, because in order for the proclamation to work, the Union Army had to go and then defeat the South.

Remember, the Emancipation Proclamation came out.

He had it in his draw in the spring of 1862, but he hadn't won any kind of major victory.

So in the fall of 1862, they managed to get a draw at the Battle of Antietam.

And with that draw, he decided it was time to end trying to find a way to break the back of the Confederacy.

And the way to break the back was to take care of the most prized asset.

slaves.

And why did he do it?

He didn't do it for moral reasons.

He did it for military reasons.

He saw that every time the Union Army rolled up to the battlefield between 1861 and up to 1862, every time the Union Army rolled up to the battle to do battle with the Confederates, who were some of the first people they saw digging the trenches, hauling ammunition, taking care of hauling food.

cleaning up the battlefield, collecting the Confederate dead.

Who did they see?

Blacks.

Who were working in ammunition factories?

The shipbuilding yard for the few Confederate ships that they had.

Done all the labor, growing the food to feed the Confederate Army.

Who was doing it?

The slaves.

So he felt that the best way to do that was to break their backs.

So it was going out the contraband.

Steve, the emancipation proclamation sees the slave as a contraband of war.

They're not human cargo.

They're contraband of war.

And John Hope Franklin talks about that beautifully in his work, The Emancipation Proclamation.

But so does Lerone Bennett, Carter G. Woodson.

Even W.E.B.

DuBois talks about it in his works.

So Professor Harvey is it is it safe to say that the the wealth of the South Was was was generated and created on the backs of slaves cheap labor

labor labor The two most expensive commodities that the South had cotton if you look at the 1860 census and study the economic data

the two most expensive products that the South had were their slaves and cotton.

And that's what I would call the cotton kingdom.

And cotton was the number one economic product of the nation in 1860.

So both of those commodities, but the person that planted, picked it, harvested, processed it,

Were the slaves that cotton that made them king

And

make

your product and free labor Because

you know, it's what if you talk to the talk to the slaveholders they would say no because they think is You know three hearts in a copy fed them.

They took care of the well-being In a whole bit and they they bred them so that they could make sure that they had

held the slave, so the well-being of the slave was important.

And the best way to do this is to have a very strict code that if any slave broke it, you made an example of those slaves, and that's what they did to control the rest of

them.

And

when you do that to several generations, you come away with a population that accepts that degree of oppression.

to just work and survive.

Professor Harvey,

I gotta get you to hold that thought 8-5-5, 7-5-2, 48-42.

Well, it is always so wonderful to have Professor Bob Harvey grace these airways and as I said the other day, you know, I'm gonna make sure that Professor Harvey's voice is heard more and more through Civic Media Airways 8-5-5, 7-5-2, 48-42.

You're one and only Professor Bob Harvey on a Motown Monday on The Earl Ingram Show.

show.

As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.

That's 855-752-4842, Texas.

At that same number, my guess is the one and only Professor Bob Harvey of Charlotte, North Carolina.

You know, Professor Harvey, then it's safe to say that capitalism was built on the backs of slaves.

Is it safe

to say that?

but it wouldn't be totally true because there were a lot of different ways that capitalism was built in this country.

But in the Southern agriculture, certainly that backbone was built on the backs of slaves because they were free labor.

You see what you had in the South was a split economy because on one hand, the labor force that existed in the South, largely of poor whites, because the most Black folks that lived in the South were

slaves and those that were free were so miniscule it didn't have an impact on the economy but certainly you had free labor and you had slave labor and 90% of black folk proud to 1850 lived in the south and you have to also remember and one could say also that uh that slavery had an impact on certainly helped the status of nation why

because of the original 13 colonies.

And I'm talking now, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and then the middle states, the middle Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and then the southern states of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.

Those were the original 13 colonies.

Prior to the American Revolution, every single one of them had slavery, all of them.

So America, when Condoleezza Rice said that the Americans, you know, when you talk about race relations in this country and racism, racism is built into an American DNA.

Well, part of that story has to deal with the slaves that helped to build up.

the original 13 colonies.

And when the colonies transitioned in the 18th century to becoming states, and then later on, you know, the nation, the United States of America, they were at the backbone of it.

They were in all the battles, from Bunker Hill and Breeds Hill, to 775 to Lexington and Concord, they were there.

They were at Valley Forge.

They were all in the major battle.

They were Yorktown.

They were there.

When John Paul Jones and the little small, you know, Cotton Hill Navy was at sea, blacks on board those ships, they were there.

You know, so, you know, the story that's often told, I mean, I was sitting there watching a documentary the other night.

on all of those soldiers and stuff that landed on D-Day, thousands of them.

But nobody talked about the fact that also going ashore and then running or driving those boats that landed those guys ashore were black.

And the people that had to clean up the beaches after the soldiers had moved inland, you know, between June 6th all the way up through to August.

cleaning up those beaches, going inside those tanks, and cleaning all those dead broken bodies out.

We're African-American soldiers.

When Montgomery and Patton and Eisenhower and Bradley and those guys started moving in there and going into Belgium and heading into Germany, those armies had to be fed.

The people that drove most of those trucks, it was the Red Ball Express.

Most of their drivers were black.

So, you know, when we start talking about the history, it's a history that's lost, stolen, and strayed, as Bill Cosby once said.

That history, we were there, but we don't always get to recognition.

And so, you know, that's the story that has to be told.

So whether somebody's trying to push a woke movement or DEI, that history will not be silenced and it will not be denied because it's American history.

Not this African-American history.

It's American history.

And it doesn't mean that other people are put down because all those kids that died on the beaches in Normandy, all those young white soldiers, there were also Native Americans that died that day, too, because they were integrated.

So were Mexican American soldiers.

Death stories don't always get told, but they were there, too.

It's a cry to let people know that all people

have paid the road in making this country free.

Not as much as some, because your white males have paid the greatest price.

Professor Harvey.

Professor Harvey, we have to leave it there.

And I want people to know it's a beginning, not an end with you and this conversation.

Thank you very much.

We'll talk soon.

Up next, Reggie Jackson, the great griot of black history in the city of Milwaukee and well known all across the nation.

We'll grace these airways next on the Earl Ingram Show.

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