Do you know Germany is the second European country to observe Black History Month?
This is monumental because:
Evidence suggests that trade with the Brandenburg-African Company resulted in pocket populations of Black merchants and sailors in German cities (early 1500s);
A slave ship docked in Hamburg (1682);
The creation of a German empire in Africa resulted from the annexation of Cameroon and Togo, parts of present-day Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, and to a lesser extent present-day Namibia (began in 1884);
Before World War I, Black immigrants to Germany included students, servants, sailors, or performers in human zoos from Africa, the Caribbean, and South America;
Germany lost its African colonies officially with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (1919);
The Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service banned non-Aryans from holding government jobs (1933);
The US model of desegregation (Jim Crow) influenced the revision of the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws (1935);
As non-Aryans, Nazis targeted Black Germans who were also interned, sterilized, and forced into concentration camps; and
The advocacy organization, The Initiative of Black Germans, organized Germany’s first Black History Month (Berlin, February 1990).
If you don’t believe it, read about it:
A History of Black People in Germany;