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...
At a time when Kentucky was a slave state and many churches either defended slavery or remained silent, John Gregg Fee preached that slavery was a sin against both God and humanity. For that, he was disowned by his...
When most people think about colonialism, they picture stolen gold, enslaved people, rubber plantations, diamonds, and vast territories carved up by European empires. Few realize that one of colonialism’s most disturbing legacies wasn’t buried beneath the ground; it was...
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....
George W. Lee was a Baptist minister, businessman, and civil rights leader who became one of Mississippi’s leading advocates for Black voting rights. His efforts to help African Americans register to vote challenged the foundations of Jim Crow, and...
Rev Frederick Augustus Ross, was a Presbyterian minister whose 1857 book, Slavery As Ordained of God, became one of the most influential religious defenses of slavery in the United States. While abolitionists argued that slavery violated both Christian teaching...
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...
History is rarely as simple as “Africans sold Africans.” That sentence has become a convenient way to shift attention away from the system that made the Atlantic slave trade possible in the first place.
The truth is that Europe did...
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 remembers empire-builders in different ways. Some are celebrated in statues and street names. Others are remembered, when they are remembered at all, for the suffering they left behind. Gustav Adolf von Götzen belongs firmly to the second group....
