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....
History often remembers inventors for the machines they built, but some left behind a legacy that went far beyond their patents. Thomas Elkins was one of them. Long before his name appeared on U.S. patent documents, he was helping...
In January 1895, King Koko of Nembe launched one of the most daring attacks against British interests in nineteenth century West Africa. Leading about 1,500 warriors in 22 war canoes, he struck the Royal Niger Company’s headquarters at Akassa,...
Long before the Scramble for Africa formally divided the continent among European powers, a prince from the Kingdom of Kongo publicly condemned Portuguese interference in African affairs. Prince Dom Nicolau de Água Rosada, also known as Dom Nicolau of...
In November 1733, the island of St. John in the Danish West Indies erupted in one of the most remarkable slave revolts in the history of the Americas. By the time it was over, an enslaved man named Franz...
