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....
On May 11, 1926, Henry Patterson walked toward the home of a white woman in LaBelle, Florida, and asked for a drink of water. Patterson was a 22 year old Black road construction worker who had arrived in the...
Moses “Daddy Moses” Wilkinson’s life was an extraordinary journey from slavery in Virginia to religious leadership in Africa. Born enslaved, Wilkinson escaped during the American Revolutionary War, became a Methodist preacher, led a congregation in Nova Scotia, and eventually...
George Boxley was a white American abolitionist and former slaveholder who turned against slavery and allegedly sought to lead one of Virginia’s most ambitious slave revolts. His plan to free enslaved Africans and seize key cities never materialized after...
Rev Frederick Augustus Ross, was a Presbyterian minister whose 1857 book, Slavery As Ordained of God, became one of the most influential religious defenses of slavery in the United States. While abolitionists argued that slavery violated both Christian teaching...
Long before the Scramble for Africa formally divided the continent among European powers, a prince from the Kingdom of Kongo publicly condemned Portuguese interference in African affairs. Prince Dom Nicolau de Água Rosada, also known as Dom Nicolau of...
Christianity reached enslaved Africans inside a system that carefully managed not only their labor, but also their access to ideas. The result was not a full encounter with scripture, but a controlled version of it, shaped by what plantation...
Carl Braden was an journalist who spent much of his life challenging racism and segregation in America. His activism made him one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most committed white allies, but it also brought surveillance, blacklisting, and prison...
Thousands of enslaved Africans were imprisoned inside the dark underground dungeons of Cape Coast Castle in colonial Ghana before being forced onto slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Directly above one of those dungeons stood the Church of England Chapel,...
The Massasoit Guards were an African American militia company founded in Boston in 1854 to help protect the city’s Black community from slave catchers during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Formed by Black abolitionists at...
