Thanksgiving Revelation: Did Africans ‘Discover’ America
We ought to challenge the Eurocentric view of the world.
The Thanksgiving story is about a supposed harvest feast shared between the Native Wampanoag people and English colonialists.
Whether the story is true or not, the holiday also unintentionally highlights the “discovery” and colonization of the Americas.
It’s bad enough that Columbus couldn’t have discovered an already inhabited land, but maybe he wasn’t the first to land here from a faraway place anyway.
Were we told a double lie?
In 1975, The New York Times reported that a team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution uncovered two “Negro male skeletons” in a grave in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They were able to date the skeletons and match the dental characteristics to Africans from around the year 1250.
This was a mere 950 miles from where Chris Columbus first landed more than 200 years later in 1492.
Wait. What?
How is it possible that Africans were in the Western Hemisphere two centuries before Chris and his Spanish, Dutch and English friends shipped enslaved Africans here?
