Uzonna Anele

Mekatilili wa Menza was a Kenyan anti-colonial leader from the Giriama people who became one of the most formidable opponents of British rule in East Africa during the early twentieth century. Her resistance to colonial policies was so influential...

Elijah McCoy was an African-Canadian mechanical engineer and inventor, born to parents who had escaped slavery. He is best known for developing an improved automatic lubrication system that solved one of the greatest mechanical challenges of the Industrial Revolution....

On the night of April 19, 1980, five ordinary Black women in Chattanooga, Tennessee, became targets of a hate crime simply because of the color of their skin. They were not activists leading a protest. They were not confronting the...

For many African rulers in the 19th century, Christian missionaries were more than preachers. They were teachers, interpreters, diplomats, and often the first Europeans to gain a king’s confidence. Some African leaders welcomed them in the hope of securing...

History often remembers inventors for the machines they built, but some left behind a legacy that went far beyond their patents. Thomas Elkins was one of them. Long before his name appeared on U.S. patent documents, he was helping...

In November 1733, the island of St. John in the Danish West Indies erupted in one of the most remarkable slave revolts in the history of the Americas. By the time it was over, an enslaved man named Franz...

In 1934, in the Jim Crow South, a Black man could lose his life for almost anything. Looking a white person in the eye, refusing to step off a sidewalk, or arguing with a white man could be enough...

For decades in the mid 19th century, a brick slave jail in Lynchburg, Virginia, functioned as one of the busiest holding points in the domestic slave trade of the Upper South. Enslaved Africa men, women, and children were confined...

Rebecca Latimer Felton remains one of the most contradictory figures in American history. She is often remembered as the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. Conversely, that milestone sits beside a far darker reality. Felton was...

In the early years of British colonial rule in Uganda, resistance was not uncommon. Across the protectorate, communities reacted in different ways to the growing reach of colonial authority. Among the most significant of these early acts of defiance...