Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, was a visionary monarch, legal strategist, and resistance leader who was executed on August 8, 1914, for opposing Germany’s plan to seize ancestral lands and forcibly displace his people to make way for a European-only...
Rev. James Henley Thornwell was a prominent 19th-century Presbyterian pastor who believed that slavery was morally right and fully justified by the teachings of Christianity. A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, Thornwell argued that those who opposed slavery, particularly...
The Le Rôdeur massacre was the deliberate drowning of 36 enslaved African people by the crew of the French slave ship Le Rôdeur during its voyage across the Atlantic in April 1819. The ship was owned by French traders...
During the years of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Africans used many methods to resist their captors. While much of the resistance included escaping to freedom, there were times when slaves outright rebelled for their liberty. In one of the...
J. Marion Sims was a 19th-century American physician who came to be celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology.” But behind his medical legacy lies a deeply disturbing truth. Sims built his reputation by experimenting on enslaved Black women...
The Jesus Maria was a Spanish slave ship operating in the early 19th century during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. Named after two of Christianity’s most sacred figures, Jesus and Mary, the ship was anything but holy....
From its implementation in 1948 to its dissolution over forty years later, the Apartheid government of South Africa was determined to deny equal rights to its African citizens. Apartheid instituted legal segregation, with its goal being to keep Black...
In 1837, a Portuguese slave ship named Arrogante was intercepted off the coast of Cuba by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Snake. What at first seemed like a typical enforcement of Britain’s anti-slavery patrols soon spiraled into one of...
Lewis C. Robards was a slave trader who ran a slave jail in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became notorious for trafficking what the white slave trade called “fancy girls”, light-skinned Black girls and women who were specifically sold for...
On the morning of March 28, 1941, deep in a wooded ravine at Fort Benning, Georgia, the lifeless body of Private Felix Hall was discovered. He had been hanging from a tree by a noose, his hands tied behind...
