Uzonna Anele

Few historical figures are as complex and controversial as Bartolomé de las Casas. Celebrated as one of the earliest defenders of Indigenous rights in the Americas, he spent much of his life condemning Spanish brutality against Native peoples. Yet...

In 1846, a free Black abolitionist named Moses Dickson founded a secret organization known as the Knights of Liberty. The group's goal was ambitious and dangerous: to organize enslaved and free African Americans across the South and prepare for...

In September 1887, British officials invited king Jaja, the powerful ruler of Opobo in present-day Nigeria, to what appeared to be a diplomatic meeting aboard a British vessel. Instead of negotiations, he was arrested. Within days, the king who...

James Gillespie Birney was not born an abolitionist. He once owned enslaved Africans and lived within the slaveholding world before eventually turning against it. After freeing those he still held, Birney founded The Philanthropist, an anti-slavery newspaper that made...

Throughout the Atlantic slave world, slaveholders often promoted Christianity among enslaved Africans believing religion would encourage obedience, humility, and submission. Plantation owners funded chapels, welcomed missionaries, and encouraged Bible teaching partly because they believed Christian instruction would make enslaved...

In the early nineteenth century, European audiences gathered to stare at a young African woman whose body had been turned into a spectacle. She was advertised, examined, and reduced to an object of curiosity. That woman was Sarah Baartman,...

In the mid nineteenth century, when slavery still dominated much of the United States, a small number of Black professionals began using the law to fight the system. One of the most remarkable among them was Robert Morris, a...

Church was a formerly enslaved man who rose to become one of the first Black millionaires in American history. In an era when racial violence was common and Black Americans were largely shut out of wealth and power, he...

In early 1861, as the United States moved toward civil war, a respected rabbi in New York shocked many Americans when he opened the Bible and argued that slavery was allowed by God. In a sermon that quickly spread...

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...