greatest african american chess player

It seems that there are more than 10 grandmasters with Black African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, but we don't know how they identify themselves racially (or if they don't like to be described by race or ethnicity at all). Some of them are apparently mixed-race, and racial identification in Latin America may be very different from that of the USA (search for "hyperdescent" and "hypodescent").

Daaim Shabazz published an article about Afro-Cuban GM Roman Hernandez:

https://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2021/02/20/gm-roman-hernandez-afro-cuban-trailblazer/

The article cites other Afro-Cuban chess players (Rogelio Ortega, GM Orelvis Mitjans Perez, WGM Oleiny Linares) and says that others will be featured at another time.

GM Román Hernández Onna dies at 71

https://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2021/06/12/gm-roman-hernandez-onna-dies-at-71/

This was a great article from the Chess Drum. GM Hernandez Onna passed away in February and certainly deserves to be remembered.

But he deserves his own thread. He doesn’t really fit in this thread even tho Daaim Shabazz, the author of the obituary, is an African American. GM Hernandez Onna was Cuban.

He was pointing out that Hernandez was Afro-Cuban like Ortega. He earned his GM title in 1978, the first GM of African ancestry.

Yes, I acknowledged that, and thank you again for your excellent article.

But the topic was about African Americans, which usually means people from the United States of African descent.