The Historical Record as a Tribute to Native Americans
Early European explorers and settlers in the Americas depended on the skills and generosity of their Native hosts. No early foreign settlement could have lasted without the cooperation of Native Nations... {Read this essay}

Black Indians: From Concept to Birth
Black Indians as a concept and book was born out of a melding of four disparate elements: 1) a consuming interest in little-known aspects of African American history that began during my high school days in World War II; 2) an immersion in the pioneering research of Professor Kenneth Wiggins Porter in the 1960s; 3) a surprise conversation with Langston Hughes about my first book; and 4) the unforgettable faces of people of African lineage who peered at me from my collection of Native American photographs... {Read more}

Celebrating a Victory for Freedom
December 24th, 2007 marks the 170th anniversary of the U.S. government's first significant military defeat in its first foreign incursion. The place was Florida, then a Spanish colony. The foe was a united force of Africans, on the run from the south's slave plantations, and Seminoles, whose self-determination was endangered. The runaway Africans had been establishing prosperous, self-governing communities in the peninsula since 1738. During the American Revolution they merged with Seminole Indians into a multicultural nation that cultivated crops according to techniques learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Out of this came an alliance that shaped effective diplomatic and military responses to invaders and slavecatchers... {Read more}

Race and Racism in the Scottsboro Era (1930's)
This case of African American youths caught in the web of southern injustice, sentenced to death, thrown into a prison system that refused to recognize their humanity or their inalienable rights, shocked citizens of this country and people all over the world. At home Scottsboro intruded into the cultural, political and intellectual development of millions, particularly whites who had hardly given racial matters much thought... {Read more}

Africans and Indians: Only in America
Alex Haley's successful tracking of Kunte Kinte gave the hunt for African ancestors a needed shove forward. But driven by their stubborn will and searching eye, as researchers fanned out in pursuit of African connections, another vision appeared. First as a recurring distraction, then a source of wonder, geological detectives stumbled on Native American ancestors. Alex Haley was hardly alone when he also discovered Native American roots to his family tree... {Read more}

Black History Month: The Black West
In the nineteenth century scholars transformed our frontier saga from a grim duel with nature that unleashed the worst and best in people into a national mythology to honor Europeans for building a nation in the wilderness. This revised tale was not subject to Indian claims. It forever omitted people of African descent, and denied them a place in dime novels, school texts and tales of pioneer life... {Read more}