Slavery produced countless victims and countless perpetrators. Most slave owners faded into obscurity, but Edwin Epps remains infamous because one of the men he enslaved survived to tell the world exactly what happened on his plantation. His memoir, Twelve...
When people think of slavery in America, they often picture plantation owners, politicians, and traders. Few imagine that some of slavery’s most passionate defenders stood behind church pulpits. One of the most influential was Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a celebrated...
Born into slavery around 1800 in Hoosick, New York, Myers rose from bondage to become one of the most important abolitionists in the state. For more than two decades, he and his wife Harriet transformed their home in Albany...
Louis Rwagasore was a Burundian prince, nationalist leader, and the country’s first elected Prime Minister who became the face of Burundi’s independence movement and pushed for an immediate end to Belgian colonial rule in the late 1950s and early...
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...
