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 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 Communist Romania, he was born in Bucharest in 1902. His father Isac, initially a merchant in Galați, eventually owned a factory and several houses before losing his fortune in 1926, and died in 1941. A free spender, he