Dark, but not African

 Often Afrocentric debaters use historical texts where it is mentioned that some Native Americans were black, or dark, as some kind of "proof" that they were Africans (or of African descent), or alternatively Melanesian or Australoid. 

One example is an often quoted sentence from a travelogue written by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, when he saw some natives on the Eastern coast of North America: "They are dark in color, not unlike the Ethiopians". Mostly they forget to put such a quote into any context, for example concerning ethnographic details. They also omit to mention when the same author talks about other natives among the coast as "they are a bronze color, some tending more toward whiteness, others to a tawny color". 

Many ethnographic details Verrazano mentions do correspond well with actual paintings which the English painter John White made of natives along the same coast some 60 years later. He depicted the peoples as brown, but not African looking. 

In old travelogues Native Americans like these children were sometimes called "black" or "not unlike the Ethiopians". That does not mean they are Africans or so called "negroids", it just shows that there is a variability in skin tones among Native American peoples, where some can be rather dark and some can be very light, and many are somewhere in between. 

John White depicted native peoples , along the same coast as Verrazano, in 1585.