By Christopher Moore, Curator and Special Projects Coordinator, Schomburg Center
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus ignited the greatest change to the Americas and its people since the Ice Age. Conquest of the indigenous population and alien principles of property ownership consumed the Americas and the rest of the world. By 1820, enslaved African men, women and children constituted some 80 percent of all the people who had embarked for the Americas since 1500.
“This original black majority became indispensable in creating the prosperous New World that by the mid-nineteenth century began attracting millions of voluntary European immigrants.” Source: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press 2010, is located in the General Research and Reference Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.
Photo Credits: L to R: German Immigrants, NYPL Digital Library; Omaha Woman,
NYPL Digital Library; Christoforo Columbus, 1519; A Slave, Gordon, scarred from whippings. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center; Immigrants First View of America, NYPL Digital Library.
