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Angelo Soliman

(1721 - 1796)  Angelo Soliman  is historically recognized as the "First Moorish Freemason." Born in the Congo (Cameroon), at  age seven he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. In Europe, he was the slave (child toy) of a prominent Sicilian lady. Later, at age 16,  he was sold to a royal  family in Vienna, Austria. There, he so impressed his masters with his remarkable intelligence, they chose to educate him. I n his mid twenties , Soliman distinguished himself as a studious and honorable subject with his masters, and actually won his freedom through his high moral character and education. As a free citizen of Vienna, the world's citadel of culture and enlightenment at the time, Soliman, now a member of the royal Hapsburg household, continued to pursue a personal course of erudite and moral excellence. He spoke six languages fluently and could write three of them fluently as well. He was also a master swordsman, war hero,  chess specialist,...

From Slave To Inventor

Born a slave on a plantation near Mt. Pinson, Andrew Jackson Beard had no formal education. He learned instead how to care for animals, make plants grow, and fix things when they broke. Because he was gifted with imagination and intelligence, young Andrew excelled at all these tasks, especially the last. As a grown man working for the railroad, Beard created gadgets that solved on-the-job problems. His experiments soon led to an idea that was worth protecting with a patent. Since Beard could not read or write, he turned to Birmingham's mayor, Melville Drennen. With Drennen's help, Beard completed the necessary forms, and on July 5, 1892, he was granted a patent on a rotary engine. When he later saw a man lose an arm while trying to couple two rail cars together, he went to work on his most famous and profitable invention, the automatic car-coupling device. This invention not only saved lives and limbs of railroad workers around the world, it also made Beard a rich man; h...

Count Constantine

"Just think," [Count Constantine] de Volney declared incredulously, "that this race of Black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech! Just imagine, finally, that it is in the midst of people who call themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery, and questioned whether Black men have the same kind of intelligence as whites! source: M. Constantine de Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785 (London: 1787), p. 80-83.