Long before Central Park became New York City’s most iconic green space, its land was home to a thriving, self-sufficient settlement known as Seneca Village. Founded in 1825 by free African Americans, the community represented one of the first...
In 18th-century Liverpool, the docks bustled with ships and merchants chasing wealth, but much of that fortune was built on the lives and suffering of thousands of enslaved Africans who were treated as mere cargo. One of the men...
In the United States before the Civil War, slavery was not only a social system but also a business. Every part of enslaved life was measured and turned into profit. From the crops they grew to the children they...
In June 1942, an African man named Jonas N’Doki was executed in Nazi Germany, not for murder, treason, or political rebellion, but for what officials branded as “sexual misconduct with White women,” a charge driven more by racism and...
In 1815, when slavery was still widely accepted in American society and often ignored by the church, George Bourne spoke out against it. He was the first American pastor to be removed from his position for opposing slavery and...
Henrietta Smith Bowers Duterte was a pioneering African-American funeral home owner, philanthropist, and courageous abolitionist from Philadelphia who turned her profession into a powerful tool of resistance, smuggling freedom through the very rituals meant to honor the dead. She...
In the summer of 1784, the quiet town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, was thrown into chaos, not by war or natural disaster, but by a violent, racially charged riot led by white Loyalist settlers. Over several days, mobs looted,...
Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, was a visionary monarch, legal strategist, and resistance leader who was executed on August 8, 1914, for opposing Germany’s plan to seize ancestral lands and forcibly displace his people to make way for a European-only...
Rev. James Henley Thornwell was a prominent 19th-century Presbyterian pastor who believed that slavery was morally right and fully justified by the teachings of Christianity. A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, Thornwell argued that those who opposed slavery, particularly...
In 1837, a Portuguese slave ship named Arrogante was intercepted off the coast of Cuba by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Snake. What at first seemed like a typical enforcement of Britain’s anti-slavery patrols soon spiraled into one of...
