The Massasoit Guards were an African American militia company founded in Boston in 1854 to help protect the city’s Black community from slave catchers during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Formed by Black abolitionists at...
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,...
William Henry Brisbane Sr. was a Baptist pastor in the slaveholding South who built his life on enslaved labor before turning against the very system that enriched him. In a society where slavery was deeply accepted, even among religious...
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...
During the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya, a vast network of concentration camps was created to imprison Africans suspected of fighting against colonial rule or supporting the Mau Mau. Among these camps, one became notorious for...
In 1990, the Catholic Church declared Marie-Marguerite d’Youville a saint. Canonized by Pope John Paul II, she became the first Canadian born person to receive that honor, and today her name appears on churches, schools, charities, and universities across...
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...
Ernest Ouandié was a Cameroonian teacher who left the classroom to join the struggle against French colonial rule in his country. As the fight for independence intensified, he became one of the most determined leaders resisting French domination and...
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...
In the years after the American Civil War, the United States entered the Reconstruction era, when formerly enslaved Africans began gaining rights that had long been denied to them. In 1868, a new constitution in Georgia granted Black men...
