A Survey of Recent Literature on the Biological Past of the Black

Abstract

It was evident from the very beginning of the colonization of the Americas that the West African had experienced a biological past which differed in significant ways from that of other peoples. For in that beginning, dead Indians began accumulating “in heaps, like bedbugs” as they succumbed to diseases that accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores and their animals from Iberia. But the black slaves who accompanied them as well, did not die, or rather, the Spaniards temporized, “if we did not hang a Negro, he would never die.” In addition to this immunologic hardiness, the black was physically sturdier. Common wisdom had it that he could do the work of four Indians.