We all came from Africa......
On the question of the origins of Black people in North America, let's not discount the African explorers who came centuries before Columbus supposedly "discovered" America. While most African-Americans are descendants of Africans uprooted by European slavery, some came prior to Christopher Columbus of their own free will.
We cannot know for sure the movements of people on earth when it was a singular land mass called Pangaea or Pangea, a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras approximately 335 million years ago, and thoughts regarding culture, race and identity during that era would be irrelevant and misplaced anyway. Pangaea assembled from earlier continental units but began to break apart about 175 million years ago. Post-pangaea, it has been proven that human migration did emanate form the Omo valley in East Africa, but human migration, within the context of culture and history must be more closely approximated near the periods we actually began to identify within cultural frameworks...separate among phenotypes...and retain or lose melanin.
A flotilla of ships set sail from Egypt around 232 B.C., during the reign of Ptolemy III, on a mission to circumnavigate the globe. The six ships sailed under the direction of Captain Rata and Navigator Maui, a friend of the astronomer Eratosthenes, who was head of the Alexandria library. The commander and navigator knew from Eratosthenes that the circumference of the Earth was 250,000 stades (approximately 28,000 miles), and they had state-of-the-art astronomical and navigational equipment. Although there is no record that the flotilla returned to Egypt, Maui and others left records of their voyage along the way. The details of the expedition are known to us through written inscriptions and drawings left in caves, primarily in what are now called the “Caves of the Navigators” in North-West New Guinea (now Irian Jaya), near McCluer Bay; a cave near Santiago, Chile; and others from Pitcairn Island and Fiji. 
The New Guinea inscriptions and drawings were discovered by a German exploratory expedition in 1937, led by Josef Ro ̈der of the Frobenius Institute of Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the Chilean inscription was found in 1885, by the Chilean-German engineer Karl Stolp, but they were not deciphered until the 1970s, when marine biologist and linguist Barry Fell figured out the connection between the Maori (Polynesian) language and a dialect of ancient Egyptian-Libyans. Hundreds more ancient Maori inscriptions exist in the Polynesian islands, and, as Fell notes, there are also inscriptions in the ancient Egyptian-Libyan dialect in North America.
When Captain Rata and Navigator Maui appeared they found the coastal tribes in desperate disarray. They informed the Olmec tribes of the many uninhabited Islands they encountered on their journey and offered to guide them to these new lands. The Olmecs banded together their remaining people and with the aid of Captain Rata upgraded their custom canoes and set out from Coastal America to the islands of the pacific with the fleet of Maui and Rata, to begin their journey to Hawai'i.
Though Maui and Rata discovered the Coastal tribes to be extremely skilled and knowledgable in many areas including the use of their own written recording system, Maui and Rata introduced to the tribes the three writing systems of Egypt, Heiroglyphic, Ancient Greek and an older Egyptian-Libyan Petroglyph Script, which the later known Polynesians incorporated into one written language, the Rongorongo Script, after the styled construct of traditional Egyptian Heiroglyphs.
In the year 1311 AD, Malian sailors got to America, 181 years before Columbus. One can only wonder how Columbus could have discovered America when people were watching him from America’s shores.
According to Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commanding officer who has spent 14 years charting the movements of a Chinese expeditionary fleet between 1421 and 1423, even the Chinese eunuch Admiral, Zheng He, was there before Columbus. It is generally stated that Zheng He, in his colossal multi-masted ships stuffed with treasure, silks and porcelain, made the first circumnavigation of the world, beating the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan by a century, but this does not take into account the exploits of the Egyptians, Rata and Maui.
However, the strongest evidence of African presence in America before Columbus comes from the pen of Columbus himself. In 1920, a renowned American historian and linguist, Leo Weiner of Harvard University, in his book, Africa and the discovery of America, explained how Columbus noted in his journal that Native-Americans had confirmed that “black skinned people had come from the south-east in boats, trading in gold-tipped spears.”
One of the first documented instances of Africans sailing and settling in the Americas were black Egyptians led by King Ramses III, during the 19th dynasty in 1292 BC. In fact, in 445 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs’ great seafaring and navigational skills. Further concrete evidence, noted by Dr. Imhotep and largely ignored by Euro-centric archaeologists, includes “Egyptian artifacts found across North America from the Algonquin writings on the East Coast to the artifacts and Egyptian place names in the Grand Canyon.” In 1311 AD, another major wave of African exploration to the New World was led by King Abubakari II, the ruler of the fourteenth century Mali Empire, which was larger than the Holy Roman Empire.
The king sent out 200 ships of men, and 200 ships of trade material, crops, animals, cloth and crucially African knowledge of astronomy, religion and the arts.
An Egyptian scholar, Ibn Fadl Al-Umari, published on this sometime around 1342. In the tenth chapter of his book, there is an account of two large maritime voyages ordered by the predecessor of Mansa Musa, a king who inherited the Malian throne in 1312. This mariner king is not named by Al-Umari, but modern writers identify him as Mansa Abubakari II.
African explorers crossing the vast Atlantic waters in primitive boats may seem unlikely, or perhaps, far fetched to some. Such incredible nautical achievements are not as daunting as they seem, given that numerous successful modern attempts have illustrated that without an oar, rudder or sail ancient African boats, including the “dug-out,” would certainly have been able to cross the vast ocean in a matter of weeks.
As time allows us to drift further and further away from the “European age of exploration” and we move beyond an age of racial intellectual prejudice, historians are beginning to recognize that Africans were skilled navigators long before Europeans, contrary to popular belief.
Of course, some Western historians continue to refute this fact because, consciously or unconsciously, they are still hanging on to the 19th-century notion that seafaring was a European monopoly.
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