'Black in Latin America': The Other African Americans | The Root

'Black in Latin America': The Other African Americans | The Root: I first learned that there were black people living somewhere in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States when my father told me the first thing he had wanted to be when he grew up. When he was a boy about my age, he said, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Md., a black man from some place called Haiti.

I knew by this time that there were black people in Africa, of course, because of movies such as Tarzan and TV shows like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Ramar of the Jungle. And then, in 1960, when I was 10 years old, our fifth-grade class studied 'Current Affairs,' and we learned about the 17 African nations that gained their independence that year. I did my best to memorize the names of these countries and their leaders, though I wasn't quite sure why I found these facts so very appealing.