Beneath the streets of some of America’s largest cities lie the graves of thousands of enslaved and freed Africans. Office towers rise above them and highways cut across them. In many places, people go about their daily lives unaware...
In the early years of the United States, openly condemning slavery in the South could cost a preacher his position. This was the reality faced by James M. Gilliland, a Presbyterian minister whose opposition to slavery led to his...
Robert Lewis Dabney was among the most influential Southern Presbyterian theologians of the nineteenth century. A pastor, seminary professor, and Confederate officer, he became a central figure in the effort to defend slavery and racial hierarchy through Christian theology...
Nduna Songea Mbano was a Ngoni sub-chief and key leader in southern Tanzania who played a central role in resisting German colonial rule during the early 20th century. His leadership during the Maji Maji Rebellion made him a symbol...
Rev. Thornton Stringfellow was the pastor of Stevensburg Baptist Church in Culpeper County, Virginia, and one of the most notorious defenders of slavery in antebellum America. While he also promoted Sunday Schools, and domestic missions, his enduring legacy is...
William Byrd II was one of colonial Virginia’s most powerful men. He was wealthy, educated, politically connected, and widely respected among the white ruling class. He helped found Richmond and Petersburg, served on the Virginia Governor’s Council for decades,...
Quamina Gladstone was an African-born enslaved man in British Demerara (modern-day Guyana) whose religious leadership and moral authority placed him at the center of one of the most significant slave uprisings in British colonial history. A carpenter by trade...
Peter Randolph was born into slavery in Virginia but rose to become one of New England’s most respected Black ministers. His 1893 autobiography, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, recounts his journey from slavery to freedom, his legal fight...
Among the many forgotten names buried in America’s history of slavery, few stories are as disturbing as that of Ginger Pop, an enslaved African man whose life ended brutally on a Louisiana plantation in 1853. His death, and the...
In the afternoon of February 15, 1851, inside a federal courthouse, an enslaved African man named Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped slavery in Virginia less than a year earlier, was being held under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of...
