In December 1922, the small town of Perry, Florida, became the scene of a wave of racial violence after the murder of a white schoolteacher. Over the following two weeks, white mobs killed several Black men, burned Black homes...
Robert Wedderburn was a Jamaican-born preacher and radical abolitionist who was jailed for his outspoken attacks on slavery and religious authority. Born around 1762 to an enslaved Black woman and a Scottish plantation owner, he grew up close to...
In the fall of 1861, Mary Peake began teaching Black children who had escaped slavery in Virginia. Her classroom was beneath a large oak tree near Fort Monroe, where thousands of formerly enslaved people had sought refuge behind Union...
William Parker was a formerly enslaved man who escaped from Maryland and settled in Pennsylvania, where he built a life among a growing Black community determined to protect its freedom. He became known for helping others who had escaped...
In 1818, Rev. Jacob Gruber stood before thousands of people at a Methodist camp meeting in Maryland and openly condemned slavery. He called the institution a “national sin” and warned that it was offensive to God and harmful to...
On 3 March 1959, eleven Kenyan detainees were beaten to death at Hola detention camp in eastern Kenya by guards working under the British colonial administration. The men were among hundreds of Kenyans detained during the Mau Mau Emergency,...
On September 8, 1919, two Black World War I veterans, Bowman Cook and John Morine, were lynched in Jacksonville, Florida. A White mob took the two men from the Duval County Jail and drove them to the edge of...
The Opelousas Massacre, also known as the St. Landry Massacre, was one of the bloodiest episodes of racial violence during the Reconstruction era. Although the exact death toll remains unknown, historical estimates generally put the number of Black people...
Long before African countries began gaining independence from European colonial powers, Africans were already organizing against colonial rule. One of the early figures in that struggle was André Matsoua, a Congolese political activist who challenged French colonial rule decades...
In 1662, the colony of Virginia passed a law that changed the future of slavery in North America. It declared that the status of a child would be determined by the condition of the mother. If an enslaved African...
