Dr. John Hope Franklin feels that influences of the religion of Mohammed on the African way of life have been exaggerated. It seems certain that Mohammedanism had little influence upon black Africans prior to the fourteenth century. As early as the seventh century the Moslems swept from Arabia over into Egypt. Subsequently, they moved into North Africa with great success. But when they attempted to penetrate the land of the black African below the Sahara, they encountered complex resistance from the kingdoms of Ghana, Melle, and Songhay, where thriving cultures were already in operation. Some Negro monarchs accepted Mohammedanism for economic or political reasons, but their subjects clung to their tribal religions. The Moslems were never able to win over the peoples of Melle, Hausa, Yoruba, and Susu despite the fact that Negroes were accepted as their equals. And when invited to enjoy both the economic and cultural advantages the religion offered, the masses of West African Negroes rejected Islam in favor of their own tribal way of life. It is of singular significance that Christianity was already entrenched in North Africa when Mohammedanism made its appearance there in the seventh century. The two faiths became locked in a life-and-death struggle for the control of North Africa. But in West Africa, the region from which the bulk of the Negro slaves were taken, Christianity was all but unknown until the Portuguese and Spanish set up their missions in the sixteenth century. Almost from the onset Christianity was beset by moral ambivalence; on the one hand the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries espoused a doctrine of equality and brotherhood while on the other hand Spanish and Portuguese slave traders were seizing thousands of Africans and shipping them off to the New World to become slaves. It was thus aboard “The Good Ship Jesus” that the first slaves arrived in America. As John Hope Franklin comments, “If the natives of West Africa were slow to accept Christianity, it was not only because they were attached to their own particular form of tribal worship, but because it was beyond the capacity of the unsophisticated West African mind to reconcile the teaching of brotherhood and the practice of slavery by the white interlopers.” The European Christians, however, found no conflict between Christ and slavery and by 1860 the twenty Negroes who landed at Jamestown in 1619 had become four million. _The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land_ The literature of the American Negro rumbles with the controversy over the transplantation, or lack of it, of African culture. Some Africanisms have survived in the New World, particularly in the West Indies and in Haiti. But the impact of the New World culture upon the Africans--who were already culturally diffused--was decisive.