Cesar Picton was a formerly enslaved African child, taken from Senegambia in West Africa and gifted to a British politician. He rose to become a wealthy coal merchant and property owner in 18th- and 19th-century England, defying the odds...
Shields Green, also known as “Emperor,” was one of the most enigmatic figures in the fight against slavery in the United States. An escaped slave from Charleston, South Carolina, Green became a close associate of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and...
King Toera was the last independent ruler of the Menabe region in western Madagascar who was executed by French colonial forces in 1897 during their conquest of the island. After initially extending hospitality to the French, he was met...
During the early 20th century, when lynching was a widespread tool of racial terror in the United States, a determined group of women formed the Anti-Lynching Crusaders to combat this horrific practice. This organization, established in 1922 as an...
Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were not just slave traders; they were industrialists of human misery and were the most influential and ruthless slave traders in the history of the United States. Operating in the 1820s and 1830s, they...
In September, 1855, the town of Franklin, Tennessee, was shaken by one of the most horrifying acts of cruelty ever recorded. A woman named Ellen Bordon, driven by jealousy over her husband’s attention to an enslaved Black woman in...
Elizabeth Greenfield, known as “The Black Swan,” was one of the most remarkable vocalists of the 19th century. Born into slavery in Natchez, Mississippi, sometime between 1808 and 1826, she overcame immense racial and social barriers to become the...
On April 6, 1968, 17-year-old Robert James “Lil’ Bobby” Hutton was murdered by Oakland police in a hail of bullets. He was the first member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) to be killed, just a year and a...
Throughout the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, many enslaved Africans were forced to live their lives without ever experiencing freedom. However, the innate human desire for self-determination remained unyielding, leading many to seek freedom through the Underground Railroad...
Mary Prince was the first Black woman to publish an autobiography detailing her experiences in slavery. Born into slavery in Bermuda, she was sold multiple times and endured severe hardships across the Caribbean. In 1828, she traveled to England,...
