This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those found in the Benue-Kwa languages of the Niger-Congo family, which are spoken along the coast of West Africa from Ghana to the Cape of Good Hope. I use a corpus that consists of carefully transcribed natural speech in basilectal and mesolectal Crucian Creole that I obtained in 2006 during a fieldwork course in St. Croix. My work is based on Alleyne's thesis (1980) that the Atlantic Creoles arose naturally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from bilingual and multilingual contacts between Europeans and West Africans, who spoke languages belonging to the Benue-Kwa and other branches of the Niger-Congo language family. Alleyne acknowledges that English contributed to the new systems, but the evidence presented by him suggests that important structural continuities from West Africa persist in present-day Afro-American varieties. Alleyne's continuity model uses the comparative method to establish the African roots of the grammars of the Atlantic Creoles. Alleyne discusses extensively the African syntactic and phonological base from which Afro-American languages descended and also argues that African and European languages were part of the socio-cultural matrix in contact areas in Africa, and that the proto-language(s) from which the Atlantic Creoles emerged had more African Niger-Congo linguistic characteristics than European features. Through his continuity model, he is able to show that the changes undergone by Atlantic Creoles in phonology and in grammar are what would be expected from normal processes of linguistic acculturation. These changes, even though significant, have left intact many of the African prosodic and syntactic features of the original proto-Creole reconstructed in part by Alleyne. For him, the notion held by many creolists that Creoles result from a process of "expansion" from "simplified" or "restricted" pidgins is not based on facts or reliable evidence, since the grammars of the Atlantic Creoles have not changed significantly throughout time. Parting from Alleyne's thesis, I searched in my data for the features and constructions identified by Faraclas (1990) as commonly occurring both in the Atlantic Creoles and in his sample of Niger-Congo languages, which are among the most widely spoken in Southern Nigeria. My findings strongly suggests that the grammars of the Atlantic Creoles were indeed influenced by the grammars of the Niger-Congo languages and that Crucian retains a considerable amount of these African influenced grammatical features. I provide a detailed discussion of some of these features, with examples from both Crucian and the Niger-Congo sample languages. These features are discussed more holistically and analytically, in terms of the grammatical systems within which they function in Niger-Congo languages and in the Atlantic Creoles. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]