reprinted more than twenty times, and he is lionized by black undergraduates
across America. Rap music groups chant “but we already had been there” in
verses about Columbus.^31 Obviously, African Americans want to see positive
images of “themselves” in American history. So do we all.
Rock heads nine feet tall face the ocean in southeastern Mexico.
Archaeologists call them Olmec heads after their name for the Indians who
carved them. According to an archaeologist who helped uncover them, the
faces are “amazingly Negroid.” Today some archaeologists believe that the
mouth lines resemble jaguarlike expressions Mayan children still make. Others
think the statues are of “fat babies” or Indian kings or resemble sculptures in
Southeast Asia.
As with the Norse, including the Phoenicians and Africans gives a more
complete and complex picture of the past, showing that navigation and
exploration did not begin with Europe in the 1400s. Like the Norse, the
Phoenicians and Africans illustrate human possibility, in this case black
possibility, or, more accurately, the prowess of a multiracial society.^32 Unlike
the Norse, the Africans and Phoenicians seem to have made a permanent
impact on the Americas. The huge stone statues in Mexico imply as much. It
took enormous effort to quarry these basalt blocks, each weighing ten to forty
tons, move them from quarries seventy-five miles away, and sculpt them into