“On the lush island of Hispaniola in 1511, Admiral Diego Columbus, governor and son of the explorer, received a most unusual gift early Christmas morning. At the sound of the second cockcrow, some twenty enslaved persons, heretofore proscribed within what was a sizeable ingenio, or sugar mill and its environs, lay aside their fears and set upon a path of alteration. Intent on spreading sedition throughout the island, the insurrectionists moved to mobilize an equal number of coconspirators on neighboring establishments. Machetes in hand, they literally dismembered plantation personnel and livestock as they proceeded, initiating a ‘wild and bloody expedition under dawn’s early light.’ In their wake lay torched houses and fields, while ‘here and there in the open ground lie the decapitated bodies of unfortunate whites who [the insurgents] were able to catch off-guard.’ On December 8 they reached the cattle ranch of Melchoir de Castro, some thirty miles from the island’s capital of Santo Domingo, upon which they may have been planning an assault. By then, however, they no longer enjoyed the element of surprise; a mixed force of Europeans and indigenous persons under Melchoir de Castro’s leadership, both militia and volunteers, attacked the desperate band of Africans, effectively ending the revolt. Those not immediately killed took to the hills, only to be captured within a week. When the dust settled, some fifteen bodies were recovered, including those of at least nine Europeans; Diego Columbus reflected that if the uprising had not been quickly quelled, many more ‘Christian’ lives would have been lost. Thus began the first collective insurrection of Africans in the Americas, a movement largely composed of Senegambians, a significant proportion of whom were probably Muslim.”
-Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas