The visionary free jazz musician and Afro-Futurist Sun Ra was a visiting artist and professor at the University of California-Berkeley in 1971. Here is fascinating audio from a lecture he gave in his Spring course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”
The reading list for his course:
The Radix: A New Way of Making Logarithms.
Alexander Hislop: The Two Babylons.
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky.
David Livingstone: Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.
Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro.
Archibald Rutledge: God’s Children.
Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971) — a black literary journal published byTemple University in Philadelphia.
John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, United States Information Agency.
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books, 1972.
The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description; = The King James Bible).
As Ra said:
In 1972, a feature-length Afrofuturist/blaxploitation film, Space is the Place, was made based on Sun Ra’s Berkeley lectures. You can watch the complete film on Youtube.