Africa and the American Negro

No archaeologist, no historian, no philologist will be more startled by the data collected in this book than I have been in their discovery. While I to a certain extent foresaw the end toward which the presence of Africans in America before Columbus must ultimately lead in the social and religious orders, I did not allow myself in my first two volumes to be influenced by any such considerations, but confined myself to an analysis of the documentary evidence as to the American origin of cotton, tobacco, the bread roots, and wampum. When it became necessary similarly to subject the spiritual culture of the New World to a comparative study, it turned out that the difficulties in the way were far more serious than when I undertook to brush aside the accumulated misconceptions in regard to the material civilization of pre-Columbian times. Not only was the documentary proof scanty for America.....