David L. Evans, renowned electrical engineer, and college admissions officer

By HERB BOYD Special to the AmNews

At a recent Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP) panel discussion about the legacy and contributions of the late Dr. S. Allen Counter, considerable attention was given to his explorations to Greenland and Surinam. On the venture to Surinam, the polymath doctor was accompanied by David L. Evans, an electrical engineer, but other than noting this, little else was said about Evans.

This is an attempt to bring Evans out of the immense shadow of his companion. However, there is no absolute certainty that the man profiled is actually who we think he is—that is, in several articles about him, none of them note anything about his travel with Counter. Still, there is, as they say, enough circumstantial information to suggest he is, and if it isn’t who we think he is, this Evans will suffice.

Most of the evidence compiled here comes from his trip with Counter, who in the introduction of his book “I Sought My Brother” explains how Evans took the journey with him. More accurately, the account here was taken from the book’s foreword by Alex Haley, who studied their trip as a way to chart his own course of research for his book, “Roots”.

“When I first heard about a pair of Black scholars from Harvard University—S. Allen Counter, a neuro-biologist, and David L. Evans, an electrical engineer—who had traveled deep into a jungle expanse of Suriname, South America, where few other outsiders had ever been, I heard with a thrill that they had visited the villages of a black bush people representing some three centuries of unmixed African descent—a bush people