Who was the first African-American to be killed?

Answer 1

The short answer is: there is no way to know, just as there is no way to know when a white man first killed a black man. Such "firsts" have not been preserved in history anywhere. But the long answer requires an explanation of why it's difficult to answer your question. While we do have a lot of historical documents, recorded history (what was written down and preserved) is never the history of everything that ever happened. We only have some record of some cultures, and the people who could read and write tended to be the upper-class elites, who were worried about robbers and bandits, most of whom were said to be from the lower social classes. In ancient times, when people killed each other, race was not the reason. In fact, just like statistics show us today, most crime occurred between members of the same racial group. Violence was usually about jealousy, greed, or other negative emotions, rather than a member of one race hating someone from another race. Religion was more likely to be a cause of dissension than race-- there absolutely were religious wars, but again, the race of the other side was often the same.

Another problem in answering your question is that what we today call a "black man" (or woman) had many names in ancient times-- there were Moors, Kushites, Nubians, etc. Because many of the older Africans cultures were predominantly oral, we have few written records from them, so we don't know with whom they traded or how they got along with non-Africans. But even in ancient times, we know the majority of early battles were not based on race-- they were based on defending ownership of land or property, maintaining tribal loyalties against outsiders, or defending your country against "the enemy" in a war declared by your king or ruler.

And finally, regarding more modern times, we have to factor in that history is often written by the "winners," and it reflects their view. For example, we do have newspaper accounts of black men killing white men during the era of slavery (although we don't know who did this first). But consider who wrote these news stories. Since history is written by the winners, it was the the slave-owners who told the story their way, making their side seem right and reinforcing a narrative that blacks were violent and ignorant and needed to be "tamed." Slaves, most of whom were illiterate, could not write history for their point of view until years later when a few escaped and began to create their own narrative about how brutally they were treated. But by then, the popular belief among many white Americans was that while some slave-owners were harsh, most were benign. Today, we know that was untrue, but the myth of the kindly plantation owner and the violent black man became a staple of popular culture; it was widely disseminated in songs, legends, and even in early movies.