Abram Colby was dragged from his bed to the woods by a white mob on October 29, 1869, where he was beaten with sticks and leather straps for more than three hours. Two days earlier, he had refused a...
The Church of England on February 8, 2006, confronted an uncomfortable part of its history. Its General Synod voted unanimously to apologize for the church’s role in sustaining and profiting from the transatlantic slave trade. The apology acknowledged that...
On 22 February 1757, enslaved Africans at a timber plantation in Dutch-controlled Suriname rose against their enslavers. What followed was a rebellion that spread across the region, drew hundreds of people away from the plantations and dealt a serious...
Joe Woodman was a Black sawmill worker in Arkansas who was lynched in July 1905 after eloping with a white girl. After the couple were found and brought back to Dumas, Woodman was locked in jail. During the night,...
In the years before the American Civil War, slavery was not only defended by politicians and slaveholders. Some Christian ministers also built theological arguments around it, using the Bible to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity. One of...
In December 1869, a young Black man named Cyrus Guy was taken by a white mob in Orange County, North Carolina, and lynched for allegedly insulting a white woman. There was no trial, no opportunity for Guy to defend...
In December 1922, the small town of Perry, Florida, became the scene of a wave of racial violence after the murder of a white schoolteacher. Over the following two weeks, white mobs killed several Black men, burned Black homes...
In 1818, Rev. Jacob Gruber stood before thousands of people at a Methodist camp meeting in Maryland and openly condemned slavery. He called the institution a “national sin” and warned that it was offensive to God and harmful to...
On September 8, 1919, two Black World War I veterans, Bowman Cook and John Morine, were lynched in Jacksonville, Florida. A White mob took the two men from the Duval County Jail and drove them to the edge of...
In December 1941, African miners in the Belgian Congo went on strike to demand higher wages. The cost of living had risen sharply during the Second World War, while African workers were earning far less than their European counterparts....
