Speaking at the briefing, Wayne Yong, the president of Port of Harlem Gambian Education Partnership (POHGEP), explained that the exhibit features the biographies of five West Africans who helped develop the United States during its infancy.

He disclosed that the exhibit is also online at www.pohgep.net and will help Americans and others see these famous humans as not only African-Americans, but also as Africans from particular cultures and not just from the vastness of the homeland.

He disclosed that in 2006, POHGEP presented a panel of Mandigo-American Martin Robison Delany to The Gambia National Council of Arts and Culture.

He promised to add more panels to the exhibit and provide copies to other institutions.

For his part, Abdou Mbaye, the director general of The Gambia National Library Authority commended the POHGEP for their magnanimous gesture. He noted that the panel will indeed further cement kinship ties and understanding of the significant roles played by people of African descent in general and from Senegambia in particular to the socio-economic, cultural and technological evolution of the United States.

Mbaye singled out one out of the panels and said Senegambia will be very proud to recognise and identify with the name Madgigine Jai.

Featured in the exhibit are: Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, who through her marriage to Zephaniah Kingsley, was a landowner and shareholder, the Kingsley Plantation Survives as a national park in Florida; Benjamin Banneker, author scientist, mathematician, farmer, astronomer, publisher, urban planner, scientist and surveyor, the wolof descendant’s lasting legacy is the layout of Washington D.C, which he assisted in surveying; Martin Robison Delany was a grandson of Mandingo paternal and maternal grandparents, physician, author, statesman, the first black to achieve the rank of major in the US Army and publisher of the Mystery newspaper. The paper is now the African Methodist Episcopol Church the Christian Recorder the oldest black religious newspaper published in United States; Francisco Menedez, commander of Fort Mose (pronounced Moh Say) the first free black community in Colonial North America. He was fluent in Mandinka, English, Spanish and Yamassee (a native American language). The grounds of Fort Mose are now a state park in Florida; Phills Wheatley was sold into slavery when she was about seven years old. She became the first African American poet published in book form.