A silenced history Despite the fact that La Española (also called Santo Domingo by extension of its colonial capital’s name) was what scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant has called “the cradle of

Content and purpose First Blacks in the Americas is a fully bilingual (English and Spanish) digital educational platform devoted to disseminating sound historical information about the early presence of people of

Each panel is a written snapshot of a particular aspect of the lives of the Black men and women of African ancestry that, free or enslaved, arrived and lived in La Española between the early 1500s and 1605. Some of the cases that appear in the exhibit include: a woman-healer; a male maroon leader; an enslaved man that tried to argue for his freedom before the colonial authorities; a female slave born in Santo Domingo that was sent to Spain and once freed bought her license to return; a man that was convicted of a crime and punished with the severance of some of his toes; the slaves of a powerful colonial official who got away with a murder protected by their master; as well as the enslaved Blacks that built the defensive walls of Santo Domingo City; and the domestic Black slaves of a colonial military officer. They help us understand the predicament and conditions of Black people in this early colony in the Americas.

CUNY DOMINICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE PRESENTS “FIRST BLACKS IN THE AMERICAS” WEBSITE THE CUNY DOMINICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE (CUNY DSI), a research unit of the City University of New York housed at