Were Black People First, by Mek Nimr (1967)
Article from ‘The Black Panther: Black Community News Service’, June 20, 1967, Oakland, California
It is not known when the first permanent inhabitants, other than Indians, arrived in what was to be the United States. There is insufficient evidence for the historians to make this decision, altho some authorities have pointed out that it is possible the ancient Phoenicians settled in New Hampshire, by way of Iceland and the British Isles, as early as 480 B.C. However, none of the evidence hinting at ancient Phoenician, Roman, Chinese, Irish, or Viking settlements is conclusive.
According to the history books, the first Africans were brought to what later became the United States is 1619, but research in old Spanish documents indicates that the history books are wrong about this important fact, as they are about so many others regarding anything pertaining to the “dark continent.”
The correction is most succinctly made by Herbert Aptheker in his book “American Negro Slave Revolts” published in 1943 by Columbia University Press. On page 163, Aptheker writes:
“The first settlement within the present borders of the United States to contain Negro slaves was the locale of the first slave revolt. A Spanish colonizer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, founded, in the summer of 1526, a community whose probable location was at or near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is now South Carolina. The settlement consisted of about five hundred Spaniards and one hundred Negro slaves. Trouble soon beset it. Illness caused numerous deaths, carrying off, in October, Ayllon himself. Internal dissension arose, and the Indians grew increasingly suspicious and hostile.
Finally, probably in November, Several of the slaves rebelled, and fled to the Indians. The next month what was left of the adventurers, some one hundred and fifty souls, returned to Haiti, leaving the rebel Negroes with their Indian friends — as the first permanent inhabitants, other than the Indians, in what was to be the United States.”