Haiti & the Dominican Republic An Island Divided.4

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. But my father's revelation about his earliest childhood ambition introduced me to the fact that there were black people living in other parts of the New World, a fact that I found quite surprising.