Black Author Revolutionizes American History

By Attorney Legrand H. Clegg II -Guest Columinist- | Last updated: Oct 18, 2013 - 4:39:51 PM

It’s October again and the nation pauses once more to celebrate Columbus Day. On the twelfth of this month, schools, banks, government agencies and other institutions suspend regular business to pay tribute to the famous Italian navigator who is alleged to have discovered America.

Most historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and other scientists and scholars now know that Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Not only were Native Americans present when he reached the New World, but also Chinese, Phoenicians, and Europeans, among others, had been sailing to the Americas thousands of years before Columbus ventured across the Atlantic.

Adding to these facts is a recent book, The First Americans Were Africans: Documented Evidence, written by a brilliant African American scholar, David Imhotep, who holds two Ph.D.s. Of course, Dr. Imhotep is not the first person to draw attention to the African presence in the Americas before Columbus. After colossal Negroid stone heads were first excavated in Mexico in the 1860s, several Latin American scholars began to speculate that Africans had sailed to the New World in ancient times.

One such scholar, J.A. Villacorta, wrote: “Any way you view it, Mexican civilization had its origin in Africa.”

During the 1920s, historian Leo Weiner wrote a three-volume study on the presence of Africans in the Americas before Columbus. By the early 1970s archaeologist Alexander von Wuthenau wrote two significant books that provide further evidence of Africans who reached the Americas in antiquity, based on figurines excavated in Mexico, Central and South America. Of course, the most comprehensive work on this subject is They Came Before Columbus: The Black Presence In Ancient America, written by Ivan Van Sertima in 1976. Since the publication of this book, other scholars, most notably Mother Tynetta Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, have shed further light on the Africans who reached and civilized pre-Columbian America.

Dr. Imhotep’s thesis is by far the most revolutionary viewpoint ever published on this subject. Unlike his predecessors he does not claim that Africans simply sailed to the Americas before Columbus and influenced the native Americans who resided in the New World. He states, instead, that the Native Americans themselves were Black Africans who first reached the New World at least 56,000 years ago. Citing skulls and skeletons, footprints in lava, campsites, genetic markers, linguistics, paintings, carvings, architecture and Egyptian writing, artifacts and structures, Dr. Imhotep shows that there were two major groups that populated ancient America. The first were Black Africans who began sailing to the New World tens of thousands of years ago. They were short people who appear to have been the ancestors of modern Pygmies. A photograph of one of the descendants of these ancient Africans was taken in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America during the 1870s. It adorns the cover of Dr. Imhotep’s book. (See photographs.)

According to Dr. Imhotep, the second group to reach the Americas in ancient times were the Mongolians, who first arrived about 3,000 B.C. They traveled from Asia across the Bering Strait down through Canada and into North America. There they met Africans who had preceded them. Some Mongolians mixed with the indigenous African. Others conquered or exterminated the Black people. The Black/Mongolian mixture resulted in what we know today as the “red Indian.” In other words the Indian on the original American nickel, the Indian of our school textbooks and the Indian of Hollywood fame do not represent the original native American. They were indeed early Americans, but they were descendants of indigenous Africans (the first Americans) and invading Mongolians.

Sweeping away conventional notions of how the New World was originally populated and civilized, Dr. Imhotep takes us several steps further. In part two of his groundbreaking book he states: “The Proto-Mandingoes, Olmecs, Egyptians, and Algonquins/Skraelings [all Black people] entered the Americas thousands of years after the first Africans began arriving from Africa before 56,000 B.C.” These various Black migrants brought civilization to the New World over several millennia.

The earliest and most pervasive evidence of their presence are the strange structures called “Native American Mounds.” Built by Black Africans, these structures still survive in 41 states of North America. One such mound, the Cahokia of Illinois, is almost as large as the great pyramids of Egypt. Further evidence, recognized by Dr. Imhotep and largely ignored by archaeologists, includes “Egyptian artifacts [that] have been found across North America from the Micmac/Algonquin writings on the East Coast to the artifacts and Egyptian place/names in the Grand Canyon.”

Ironically, perhaps the best evidence of the fact that Africans preceded Columbus to the New World comes from the “great discoverer” himself. In his journal on his second voyage, Columbus reported that when he reached Haiti, the Native Americans (then called “red Indians”) told him that black-skinned people had come from the South and Southeast in ships trading in gold-tipped metal spears.

At least a dozen other European explorers, including Vasco Nunez de Balboa, also reported seeing or hearing of “Negroes” when they reached the New World.

The Gulf of Mexico appears to have been the entry point and Mexico itself the capital of the Africans who introduced Old World civilization to the New World. In the holy city of La Venta, dating back to at least 1500 B.C., four colossal stone heads with Negroid features were discovered on a ceremonial platform featuring a miniature step pyramid and a conical pyramid—the earliest of such monuments to appear in the Americas. These structures were undoubtedly constructed by the Olmecs, of whom Michael D. Coe, the leading American historian on Mexico, has written: “There is not the slightest doubt that all later civilizations [in Mexico and Central America] rest ultimately on an Olmec base.”

According to Dr. Imhotep, this African/Olmec mother culture introduced a calendar, writing, pyramid and tomb construction, mummification, as well as certain political systems and religious traditions to the New World.

Although the most thoroughly documented evidence of the African presence and influence in the ancient New World is found in Mexico, Dr. Imhotep also presents extraordinary information regarding discoveries in Central and South America. He writes about numerous pyramids and temples, the Nazca geoglyphs and the underwater structures near Bimini. He also compares the South American and Egyptian religious and writing systems. Furthermore, Dr. Imhotep speaks of Negroid skeletons, skulls and figurines that have been discovered in Central and South America.

For years, the Western academic and scientific establishment has claimed that Black people are small-brained, genetically inferior subhumans with no history. This has been devastating to the self-esteem of people of African descent in general and Black children in particular. Dr. David Imhotep joins a long line of Black scientists and scholars who have dismissed this errant nonsense and resurrected the cultures and history of Black people around the world. The First Americans Were Africans: Documented Evidence is an explosive tome whose revolutionary contents will alter the course of historical research and writing—and will debunk the Columbus myth forever.

(Legrand H. Clegg II is City Attorney Emeritus for Compton, California, and producer of the documentary “When Black Men Ruled The World.” Dr. David Imhotep can be reached at [email protected].)

The Final Call