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Nashid Al-Amin
Nashid Al-Amin, author of True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages, is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Harlem. A Vietnam era army veteran who served three years, he was ...view moreNashid Al-Amin, author of True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages, is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Harlem. A Vietnam era army veteran who served three years, he was stationed in France and Germany during the mid-1960s and spent time in four other European countries—including a two-week leave in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Upon leaving the army, he pursued acting for a number of years but had also begun studying history—especially the black man’s role in it. Although he was an honor student in high school, his family did not have money to send him to college; however, he continued to pursue acting and to study history on his own before entering college at thirty years old. Earning a master’s degree in English, he began teaching in colleges as an adjunct English professor, currently at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey.
He is a divorced father of three who has now studied history on his own for more than forty years. He began focusing on the Vikings in 1991, spurred by the buildup for the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America. Wondering why the Vikings were not accorded this achievement, he wrote a twenty-page research paper to try and find the answer, reading it to a class he was teaching to see their reaction. However, it was when he began a second draft that he found information that the Vikings had, in fact, been black skinned—not the blond, blue-eyed whites he had always believed. The paper expanded to sixty-five pages; then he decided he had enough information to write a book.
Through financial difficulty and two lost apartments, he finally restarted work on the book in 2003 and presents the reader with startling information about the Vikings and other peoples who have inhabited Europe.view less