When slavery ended in the United States in 1865, nearly four million formerly enslaved Africans faced the enormous task of building new lives in a society that had long denied them freedom, education, and economic opportunity. Freedom did not...
In the early twentieth century, as European powers tightened their grip on Africa, Italy set its sights on Libya. After invading the region in 1911, Italian forces began a harsh campaign to turn the country into a colony. Among...
During the era of slavery in the Americas, many slaveholders encouraged enslaved Africans to adopt Christianity. Missionaries and pastors often preached to enslaved communities because slaveholders believed religion would make them more obedient. However, while enslaved Africans were encouraged...
George William Gordon is remembered today as one of Jamaica’s national heroes, but in his own lifetime he was viewed by the colonial authorities as a dangerous critic of British rule. His arrest and execution in 1865, during the...
Rodolfo Graziani was one of the most violent figures produced by European colonialism in Africa. An Italian general and senior official under Benito Mussolini, he became notorious for directing mass killings, chemical warfare, and terror campaigns during Italy’s invasion...
Richard Mentor Johnson, a powerful U.S. senator from Kentucky who would later rise to the vice presidency, built a remarkable political career in early nineteenth century America. But his life was shadowed by a relationship he refused to conceal....
Kissi Kaba Keita was a nineteenth-century African chief and war leader from the Kissi people of what is now southeastern Guinea. He is remembered for organizing armed resistance against French colonial expansion in the early 1890s. His refusal to...
In 1724, colonial Jamaica crossed a legal line that revealed how fragile justice was once race entered the picture. After a free Black man whooped a white attacker and successfully defended himself in court, Jamaica’s white-controlled Assembly responded not...
In 1958, the United States witnessed what is widely regarded as the most absurd “rape case” in its legal history. Known as the Kissing Case, the incident involved two African American children, nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson and seven-year-old David...
When people think of the Ku Klux Klan, they often imagine hooded mobs and night riders from the era of Reconstruction. What is less widely known is that the most powerful version of the Klan was not created in...
Anele is a web developer and a Pan-Africanist who believes bad leadership is the only thing keeping Africa from taking its rightful place in the modern world.
