Quick Bullet Points and Answers:

  • Some people believe that black people arrived America and set up civilizations in the new world hundreds of years before Columbus, and cite several evidences which includes the African features of several statues found in the Americas.Most popular of these are the Olmec Heads found in Mexico.                 (Truth is that these supposedly negroid features look exactly like many native Americans living in the area today and since prehistorical times. These Natives share many features with Africans hence the tendency to assume these statues are African) 
  • It is also said that Christopher Columbus mentioned meeting several black natives in the new world.                                                                                                                                                          (True but most people agree that since Native Americans are of a darker shade that European whites, he was referring to them as black relative to his own white skin color)
  • Other African American called Foundational black Americans claims that Africans arrived in Spanish ships in 1571 and mixed with native Americans hence there ancestry is the earliest in the new world                                                                                                                                                                ( True – The first documented foreign settlers in the New World of North America were the enslaved Black people who were brought over by Spanish colonist Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. Shortly after Ayllón and the 600 other Spaniard’s arrival to the area that would later become the South Carolina/Georgia coast, the enslaved Black captives launched a successful revolt, forcing the few remaining Spanish enslavers to ultimately retreat from the area, back towards the Caribbean. It has been stated that the slaves escaped to live with Native Americans and while this is possible, there is no contemporary account saying that enslaved Africans escaped)

  • Some African Americans lead by a charismatic person named Tariq Nasheed took this further and have been claiming that not only have black people have been living in the Americas for thousands of years before Columbus’s arrival, but
  1. That Majority of the enslaved peoples were of this stock, then slaves were imported from Africa and intermixed with them and their descendants are the African Americans of today.                                                       ( Fact – Historical and genetic records do not support this and while many Americans of all shades have Native American genes, genetic evidence suggests that majority of black Americans today are of common genetic make up with other black people of sub saharan african descent. That is not to say that there are no black native Americans today, but they are not in the majority)
  2. That even though they look like other black people, they are genetically different from later black arrivals from the Caribbean, South America, and Africa so the call themselves FOUNDATIONAL BLACK AMERICANS (FBA).                                                                                                                                                                            ( Fact is that Americans of slave decent are more likely than recent migrants from Africa to have some Native American and white genes, but same can be said of many Caribbean and South American black)
  3. That this information is hidden due to a massive conspiracy but white supremacist to deny them their right to the land and make them believe that they are from somewhere else (Africa).                                                            ( Fact is that there is no evidence for this claims and the burden of proof lies with them to proof these assertions)