YouTuber Dane Calloway posts videos and has written a book about his doubts regarding the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He has discussed his conspiracy theory to such an extent he is regarded as the father of the “Where are the slave ships?” movement in which people question Africans being transported to the Americas as enslaved people in the 1500s.

Calloway and others, like veteran hip-hop artist Lord Jamar of the Brand Nubians, believe Africans arrived in the Americas by their own means and came before explorer Christopher Columbus. In short, they doubt that Africans were slaves.

“Did the trans-Atlantic slave trade exist to the level they’re mothaf—-s are claiming? No, it didn’t,” Jamar said during a 2018 episode of his “Yanahadeen Godcast” with fellow rapper Rah Digga, Jamar. “They didn’t have the resources to do what the f–k they said they did. Where’s the slave ships?”

In one YouTube post, entitled “Where Are the ‘Slave Ships’ They Used During The Slave Trade Era?” Calloway questioned the descriptions of slave ships. “How is this even feasible?” he asks. “They’re talking about all these so-called enslaved Africans being packed on these ships…they weren’t even ships, they were boats…There’s no room to breathe, no place to pee, no water to keep them alive.”

He adds, “Put this in your mindset, ‘Would you survive this?” meaning the passage on a slave ship. He also says, “white supremacy is an illusion.”

On his Instagram profile, Calloway describes himself as an author, ethnographic researcher, film producer, and founder of #ImJustHereToMakeYouThink.

Calloway claims Black people were already in America long before the slave trade.

He co-authored, with Taneisha Calloway, the self-published book “It Was Told In Reverse: The Untold Truth About The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” It was released on June 30, 2022, and explores the theory that there was no trans-Atlantic slave trade and that the history of this is a plot by American educational institutions to miseducate Black students.

Another YouTuber disputed Calloway’s claims. In an episode entitled “History Professor Reacts to Dane Calloway/The American Negro is the American Indian” of the YouTube show “African Elements with Professor Darius, Darius Spearman, a professor at San Diego City College, breaks found the fallacy of Calloway’s claims and claims of him and others that the Black American is the true American Indigenous people.

Spearman is the author of the book “Between the Color Lines: A History of African Americans on the California Frontier from 1769 through Reconstruction,” and began his teaching career in 1999. Since then has taught courses in US History, Race, Gender, & Ethnicity, World History, and African American History, as well as numerous courses in the multidisciplinary field of Black Studies. Professor Spearman joined the faculty of the Department of Black Studies at San Diego City College in 2007.

“Not only do we have a multitude of first-hand accounts confirming that the middle passage took place, at least two African nations have apologized for their role in the Atlantic slave trade,” Spearman stressed.

(L)Woman wearing feathered headdress, screenshot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLYchOFkOYY/(R) YouTuber Dane Calloway, screenshot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkSx-HuYJHQ