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LIFE OF A BLACK PRISONER      CHAPMAN
this time the prison library didn't have any literature on Black people. However, during this period (1963) I was attending prison high school and I was offered a job to teach 7th and 8th grade science and history classes. I accepted the job at once. Shortly after I got the teacher's job, I asked the civilian instructor (a Black man named Nathaniel Burgher) to bring in from the public library, books on Black History.
  I never will forget the first book I read on Black History. It was entitled World's Great Men of Color by J.A. Rogers. I was absolutely astonished by the brilliant cultural achievements of Black people extending back 6,000 years! After Rogers, I read W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Folk: Then and Now. I was very much impressed by the scholarship and erudition of Dr. Du Bois. My chest swelled with pride just to know that a Black man like W.E.B. Du Bois existed. I became a disciple of Dr. Du Bois at once, making it my solemn duty to read every book he had in print. I read Souls of Black Folks, Dusk of Dawn, Dark water, The World and Africa, one right after the other. 
  I was inspired by the writings of Dr. Du Bois to make a study of the contributions of colored people to the development of science and mathematics. I presented the results of my inquiries in a book I wrote entitled Science and Africa. 
  In studying Black History, I became more and more absorbed in the struggle for black liberation. From 1964 to the present I have been a devoted students of the current struggles for Black liberation. In the struggle of my people for freedom, I saw the need for science and I wanted to continue whatever I could in this regard. So I read, as often as I could, the works of Black authors. Here I will only name those authors who impressed me the most: O. C. Cox's Caste, Class and Rase, E. Franklin Frazier, Arna Bontemps, Saunders Redding, Horace Cayton, John O. Killens, Richard Rives, Peter Abrahams, Kwame Nkrumah, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Ernest Kaiser, Alphaeus Hunton, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and oothers whose writings are a great inspiration to me. 
This just about concludes my intellectual biography, save for one item. In doing my research for my book Science and Africa, I came into knowledge of the Marxist historians J.D. Bernal, Dirk J. Struik, Benjamin Farrington and Bernhard J. Stern. I was so impressed with their materialist interpretations of history that I felt it was necessary for me to check their sources. Thus I was reading the writings of Marx and Engels. I must say, in all honesty, that this was one of the 

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