George Wells Parker Gravestone
Donation protected
Nebraska Public Historians is a grassroots community group seeking to illuminate and preserve local history through public actions. Our last project resulted in a new state historical marker at Potter's Field in North Omaha. For our next project, we are asking for any sort of donations, large or small, to help us cover the cost of a grave stone for George Wells Parker, who rests in an unmarked grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Biographical information:
George Wells Parker was a polymath from North Omaha.
He was a writer, philosopher, historian, poet, and pro-Black activist who in many ways was decades ahead of his time.
As an adolescent, as a student at Central High School, then known as 'Omaha High School,' he won first prize for a speech on history at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. He attended Creighton University and later Howard University.
In his college years, he read a book by white supremacist propagandist Thomas Dixon called 'The Leopard's Spots' and suffered a mental breakdown. Dixon's racist novels ended up becoming the first blockbuster hit film to come out of Hollywood, in 'Birth of a Nation,' which portrayed Black people as violent savages, and Black men as rapists out for white women, with the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes who came to save the day.
Young Parker sat in his room, surrounded by his own personal library, and dedicated himself to opposing Dixon's popular narrative with every molecule in his body. He took aim at the very premise upon which white supremacy was built - the idea that all of Western civilization was seeded in ancient Greece, and was therefore a strictly European endeavor.
Parker taught himself Greek and went into the primary sources, including the work of archeologists and linguists, to demonstrate that ancient Greek civilization was largely lifted from ancient Egypt, thereby uprooting the white supremacist notion that Western civilization sprouted entirely from Europe in the first place.
It has unfortunately also come to our attention that in 1911 St. Paul, Minnesota, he suffered a second mental breakdown and in a fit of insanity, slashed a woman to death. A doctor diagnosed him as being insane at the time of the killing and he spent over a year in a treatment center, then returned to Omaha, no longer deemed a threat to society.
Upon his return, he rose in stature by giving speeches on his historical ideas as vice president of the Omaha Philosophical Society. To spread his thesis about the origins of Western civilization, he also traveled around the nation, presenting it to all who would listen. He worked with civil rights pioneers in Omaha and New York to publish Black newspapers, providing Black perspectives during racially tumultuous times. Through these newspapers, he eventually published his historical thesis in the form of a pamphlet called 'Children of the Sun.' He also helped form the Hamitic League, an early Black nationalist group that promoted unity and education among Black people as they faced a nation in many ways hostile to their very existence.
During the Great Migration, Parker helped establish a safe route for Black Southerners to reach Omaha and find employment. He eventually turned 'Children of the Sun' into a stage play that enjoyed some success locally. According to eyewitness accounts it was quite the production, featuring elaborate African sets and costumes, which was not something one would find every day in the Midwest, especially at the time.
When the second wave of the KKK swept over the nation, Parker was one of the first to study them in depth, forming his own newspaper, 'The Whip,' in 1921 which promised an expose uncovering secrets of the Klan. Although only two issues were ever printed, Parker went on to contribute to the first nation-wide expose on the new Klan, first published by the New York World and then distributed by 15 other major newspapers across the country.
Parker was a uniquely talented, driven, and troubled individual whose memory we feel deserves preservation. For our next project, we seek to give Mr. Parker a proper gravestone at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where his body rests in a nameless plot of land. Let's give the city of Omaha something worthy of one of our forgotten poet laureates.
Biographical information:
George Wells Parker was a polymath from North Omaha.
He was a writer, philosopher, historian, poet, and pro-Black activist who in many ways was decades ahead of his time.
As an adolescent, as a student at Central High School, then known as 'Omaha High School,' he won first prize for a speech on history at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. He attended Creighton University and later Howard University.
In his college years, he read a book by white supremacist propagandist Thomas Dixon called 'The Leopard's Spots' and suffered a mental breakdown. Dixon's racist novels ended up becoming the first blockbuster hit film to come out of Hollywood, in 'Birth of a Nation,' which portrayed Black people as violent savages, and Black men as rapists out for white women, with the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes who came to save the day.
Young Parker sat in his room, surrounded by his own personal library, and dedicated himself to opposing Dixon's popular narrative with every molecule in his body. He took aim at the very premise upon which white supremacy was built - the idea that all of Western civilization was seeded in ancient Greece, and was therefore a strictly European endeavor.
Parker taught himself Greek and went into the primary sources, including the work of archeologists and linguists, to demonstrate that ancient Greek civilization was largely lifted from ancient Egypt, thereby uprooting the white supremacist notion that Western civilization sprouted entirely from Europe in the first place.
It has unfortunately also come to our attention that in 1911 St. Paul, Minnesota, he suffered a second mental breakdown and in a fit of insanity, slashed a woman to death. A doctor diagnosed him as being insane at the time of the killing and he spent over a year in a treatment center, then returned to Omaha, no longer deemed a threat to society.
Upon his return, he rose in stature by giving speeches on his historical ideas as vice president of the Omaha Philosophical Society. To spread his thesis about the origins of Western civilization, he also traveled around the nation, presenting it to all who would listen. He worked with civil rights pioneers in Omaha and New York to publish Black newspapers, providing Black perspectives during racially tumultuous times. Through these newspapers, he eventually published his historical thesis in the form of a pamphlet called 'Children of the Sun.' He also helped form the Hamitic League, an early Black nationalist group that promoted unity and education among Black people as they faced a nation in many ways hostile to their very existence.
During the Great Migration, Parker helped establish a safe route for Black Southerners to reach Omaha and find employment. He eventually turned 'Children of the Sun' into a stage play that enjoyed some success locally. According to eyewitness accounts it was quite the production, featuring elaborate African sets and costumes, which was not something one would find every day in the Midwest, especially at the time.
When the second wave of the KKK swept over the nation, Parker was one of the first to study them in depth, forming his own newspaper, 'The Whip,' in 1921 which promised an expose uncovering secrets of the Klan. Although only two issues were ever printed, Parker went on to contribute to the first nation-wide expose on the new Klan, first published by the New York World and then distributed by 15 other major newspapers across the country.
Parker was a uniquely talented, driven, and troubled individual whose memory we feel deserves preservation. For our next project, we seek to give Mr. Parker a proper gravestone at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where his body rests in a nameless plot of land. Let's give the city of Omaha something worthy of one of our forgotten poet laureates.
Organizer
Nicholas Clawson
Organizer
Omaha, NE