John the Conqueror second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo", and in "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" it is called "John De Conquer Blue". John the Conqueror was an African prince who was sold as a slave in the Americas. Despite his enslavement, his spirit was never broken and he survived in folklore as a sort of a trickster figure, because of the tricks he played to evade his masters. Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit of the "Uncle Remus" stories is said to be patterned after High John the Conqueror. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of his adventures ("High John de Conquer") in her collection of
Remus Koffler tried for crimes against peace and high treason in April 1954. He was sentenced to death and, aged 52, shot in the back of the neck at 3 a.m. on the 17th, the same night Pătrășcanu was executed. Remus Koffler Remus Koffler (1902 – April 17, 1954) was a Romanian communist activist who, during the 1930s and '40s, helped assure financing for the Romanian Communist Party. Arrested in 1949 as an inconvenient survivor, he was executed over four years later. According to his autobiography, which he wrote in early 1950, while held under arrest by the Securitate secret police of