When The World Was Black: The Untold History of the World's First Civilizations, Part One: Prehistoric Cultures

“History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.” – John Henrik Clarke

Why are there are Black communities all over the world, from southern Russia to southeast Asia, from South America to the islands of the South Pacific? Some of them are no longer around, but we know they were there. They were everywhere.

But who were these people? Where did they come from? How did they get to distant outposts like Easter Island, Tierra del Fuego, and even the frigid regions of northern Europe, Canada, and Siberia? And what role did these people play in establishing the world’s first cultures and civilizations? Finally, what happened to them?

These are the questions we’ll answer in this book. In this book, you’ll learn about the history of Black people. I don’t mean the history you learned in school, which most likely began with slavery and ended with the Civil Rights Movement. I’m talking about Black history BEFORE that. Longbefore that. In this book, we’ll cover over 200,000 years of Black history.

For many of us, that sounds strange. We can’t even imagine what the Black past was like before the slave trade, much less imagine that such a history goes back 200,000 years or more.

Can you imagine what that does to a person? To grow up believing their people started out as slaves? Perhaps some of us know a little about Africa, but how much do we really know? How much do we know about the extent of the ancient Black empires that spanned far beyond continental Africa? Chances are, very little. In this book, we’ll tell the stories you haven’t been told.

We’ll talk about the Black migrations that settled the world. We’ll talk about the Black people who founded the first cultures and civilizations of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and North and South America. No exaggeration. This book covers more than 200,000 years of Black history across every square inch of the Planet Earth. We’ll rediscover a past when the world was Black. As we learn the history of our ancestors, we’ll learn more and more about ourselves.