BLACK POPES

For African birth of Popes,see Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), p. 17,for Pope Victor; for Melchiadesa, sometimes called Miltiades, p, 40; for Gelasius, p. 110 ( L.R. Loomis, translator. New York, 1916.) These Popes came from a region where the population was originally Negro, and is still Negroid. The whitest people in North Africa today are the Kabyles and of these Weisgerber says,"All the Kabyles of the Riff, of the Grand Kabylie, of the Aures, of the Enfida, belonging to the white Mediterranean race are more or less mixed with....Negroes." (Les Blancs d Afrique, p. 83, Paris,1910.) No color distinction has ever existed in North Africa hence the Negro strain, to a great degree,runs through the entire native population. There are no authentic portraits of the earlier Popes. Such drawings of them as exist are all modelled to resemble that of St. Peter's which like that of Christ, is apocryphal. There are real portraits of the Roman Emperors, however, and in that of Septimus Sevarus, who was an African, one can perceive Negroid traits.