Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor in the Faculty ofArts and Sciences and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, andHigginbotham, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African andAfrican American Studies and chair of the Department of African andAfrican American Studies, have included the famous and the infamous, aswell as hitherto obscure individuals.

The series includes national heroes and historical figures such asMartin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. But the biographies alsoinclude Sissieretta Joyner Jones, a 19th century opera singer; RichardPotter, a magician, sword swallower, and ventriloquist who owned 175acres in New Hampshire and died in 1835; and the pistol-packing,fist-fighting Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary, of the late19th century.

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European colonisation of South America resulted in a dramatic shift from a native American population to a largely mixed one, a genetic study has shown. It suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men.

Doomed: The men of the Aztec civilisation were probably killed by the Europeans

But it adds that areas like Mexico City "still preserve the genetic heritage" because these areas had a high number of natives at the time of colonisation.

The findings appear in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

The international team of researchers wrote: "The history of Latin America has entailed a complex process of population mixture between natives and recent immigrants across a vast geographic region.

"Few details are known about this process or about how it shaped the genetic make-up of Latin American populations."

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Early History

The history of black people in Germany goes back much further than most people think. One of the first Africans known to have lived in Germany was Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759). Born in what is today's Ghana, Amo came under the protection of the Duke (Herzog) of Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and grew up in the duke's castle.

He was both the first African known to attend a German university (Halle) and the first to obtain a doctorate degree (in 1729). As a professor, under his preferred name of Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer, he taught at two German universities and published several scholarly works, including a Latin treatise entitled De Arte Sobrie et Accurate Philosophandi (1736, "On the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately"). Knowing the level of his achievements, it is all the more surprising to learn that Amo returned to Africa in 1747. Most accounts claim the reason for his return to his native Africa was the racial discrimination he encountered in Germany. Then as now, Africans in Europe were seen as something exotic and foreign.

Some historians claim that the first sizeable influx of Africans to Germany came from Germany's African colonies in the 19th century. Some Afro-Germans living in Germany today can claim ancestry going back five generations to that time. Yet Prussia's colonial adventures in Africa were quite limited and brief (1890-1918), far more modest than the British, the Dutch, the French, or other European powers, so there could not have been any great numbers. But Prussia's South West Africa colony was the site of the first mass genocide committed by Germans in the 20th century. In 1904 German colonial troops countered a revolt with the massacre of three-quarters of the Herero population in what is now Namimbia. It took Germany a full century to issue a formal apology to the Herero (in 2004) for that atrocity, which was provoked by a German "extermination order" (Vernichtungsbefehl). But Germany still refuses to pay any compensation to the Herero survivors, although it does provide foreign aid to Namibia.

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A small but groundbreaking new poll suggests that blacks face widespread discrimination in France, raising questions about a country long proud of its official colorblindness - and where collecting racial data is banned.

“If you're not counted, you don't count,” said Patrick Lozes, head of the Representative Council of Black Associations, which commissioned the poll that was conducted by telephone. The council has thousands of members, he said.

Officially, France doesn't know how many blacks it has because of its Republican tradition that doesn't distinguish by race or religion. Collecting ethnic data is generally banned - one reason why a poll like Wednesday's had not been done before.

Among more than 15,000 people contacted by the Sofres polling agency to establish a pool, 581 said they felt they had black roots - and that subgroup was questioned in the poll. No margin of error was provided.

Fifty-six percent said they felt some form of discrimination in their daily lives, and 12 percent said they did so “often.” Of those who said they discrimination, 62 percent said the incidents were most often in public or on public transportation, and 42 percent at work.

Sixty-one percent said they had experienced discrimination in the last year.

Based on the poll data, Lozes estimated there are 1.8 million voting-age blacks in France - out of a total population of some 60 million - and about four-fifths of them are French citizens.

France, like many other European countries, has been struggling with how to integrate its ethnic minorities. Nationwide riots in fall 2005 raged through housing projects in France's poor neighborhoods with large minority populations. They were often fueled by broad feelings of discrimination, unemployment and a sense of alienation from society.

“The sectarianism that I denounce is that of the current minority in power - that's to say white men, aged over 50, who are bourgeois and heterosexual,” Lozes said. “They're the minority, but a majority in the National Assembly.”

According to a survey conducted by the TNS-Sofres polling agency, 61 percent of blacks living in France say they have experienced at least one racist incident within the past year.

More than one in 10 of the 13,000 respondents said they were frequently the target of racism that ranged from verbal aggression to difficulty finding housing or jobs.

Patrick Lozes The French advocacy group The Representative Council of Black Associations commissioned the survey. Its president, Patrick Lozes, says these are troubling statistics.

Lozes predicts the poll will change things in France. Until now, he says, blacks have never been counted. And a population that is not counted, does not count.

Blacks are not counted because census and other official surveys are barred from compiling statistics based on religion or race. But some experts estimate there are about five million blacks living in France.

The head of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, Mouloud Aounit, says he is not surprised by the survey's findings.

Aounit says racism exits in French daily life. Look at the Senate, the National Assembly, regional councils, he says. Ethnic representation is totally absent.