Gert Schramm was born on 28 November 1928 in Erfurt, Thuringia, into a Germany that would later criminalize his very existence. He was the son of Marianne Schramm, a German woman, and Jack Brankson, an African American engineer working...
Quamina Gladstone was an African-born enslaved man in British Demerara (modern-day Guyana) whose religious leadership and moral authority placed him at the center of one of the most significant slave uprisings in British colonial history. A carpenter by trade...
In 1941, Pvt. Albert H. King, a young Black soldier stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, was shot and killed under circumstances that would expose the deep racial injustices of the U.S. military during the Jim Crow era. His story,...
Cordella Stevenson was a Black woman living in rural Mississippi. In 1915, after her son was suspected of a crime he didn’t commit, a white mob kidnapped and lynched her, leaving her body hanging in public. No one was...
Anarcha Westcott was an enslaved African woman whose life and suffering became central to the development of modern gynecology. For decades, her story was nearly invisible, surviving only in the writings of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the physician who...
In July 1849, Charleston’s Workhouse, a city-run prison for enslaved Africans, erupted in a desperate, violent revolt. It was here, in a place designed to crush every ounce of freedom, that Nicholas Kelly led an uprising that became one...
Peter Randolph was born into slavery in Virginia but rose to become one of New England’s most respected Black ministers. His 1893 autobiography, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, recounts his journey from slavery to freedom, his legal fight...
The Old Negro Mart is one of the last surviving buildings in America where enslaved African men, women, and children were bought and sold before the Civil War. Located on Chalmers Street, it now stands as a museum, but...
Operation Breadbasket was one of the most ambitious economic justice campaigns of the Civil Rights era, a movement built on a simple but powerful idea: Black Americans should not support businesses that refused to hire, respect, or promote them....
The Vicksburg massacre was one of the longest and deadliest attacks on freed Black Americans during the Reconstruction era. Beginning on December 7, 1874, and continuing until around January 5, 1875, the violence in Vicksburg, Mississippi left an estimated...
