Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has rejected George James's theories about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship.
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In 1987, Martin Bernal published his Black Athena, in which he claims ancient Greece was colonized by northern invaders mixing with a colony established by Phoenicia (modern Lebanon).
She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.
From the late 1980s, at the height of the Afrocentric movement in hip hop (when artists such as KRS-One, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, the Native Tongues, and Rakim hit success), the movement seemed to be incorporating many doctrines from the Nation of Islam, the Nation of Gods and Earths, and the Nuwaubians.