An African in America, 1800
Courtesy of Raheem Mander
After the Civil War, most of the Mander family migrated north to the Philadelphia area. Today, Congo and Beck’s descendants are scattered from Georgia to California and beyond.
Raheem Mander, pictured above, is Congo and Beck's great-great-great grandson and lives in Philadelphia. A proud alumnus of Morehouse and Morgan State, he creates comic books about superheroes who graduated from historically Black colleges and universities. Other Mander descendants have been farmers, teachers, truck drivers, artists, ministers, factory workers, nurses, and professors. Family members fought in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Philadelphia has a Mander Playground named after Congo and Beck’s great-great grandson, Joseph E. Mander, Sr., who drowned in 1952 while attempting to rescue a seven-year-old white child who had fallen into the Schuylkill River.
A famous African American literary figure, Sarah E. Wright, wrote a poem about Joseph Mander as an example of how Black heroes were soon forgotten.
Until the recent discovery of the document in the attic, present-day Mander descendants were unaware of their 18th-century ancestor and his journey from Africa to America.
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