Saint Frances Academy was founded in 1828 by Mary Elizabeth Lange, later known as Mother Mary Lange, at a time when educating Black people was frowned upon. It stands today as the first and oldest continually operating Black Catholic...
Harriet Jacobs’ story is one of the most extraordinary acts of survival in American history. To escape her master’s relentless sexual abuse and also slavery, she spent seven years hiding in a tiny attic, unable to stand or move...
York was an enslaved African American whose courage and skill helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition discover the vast lands of the Louisiana Territory and reach the Pacific Coast. He hunted, built shelters, navigated rivers, and won the admiration...
During slavery in America, religion was often used as a tool of control. Many preachers visited plantations to tell enslaved Africans to obey their masters and accept their suffering as God’s will. But Freeborn Garrettson, a Methodist preacher from...
In 1848, when America was still entangled in the chains of slavery, a girl named Caroline Still was born into a home where freedom was more than an idea, it was a calling. Her father, William Still, one of...
Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux de La Caye remains one of the most despised figures in the history of French Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, though today few know his name. Born in Saint-Domingue but educated in France, Caradeux returned to the Caribbean...
Theodore Parker was far from a typical 19th-century preacher. A bold reformer and one of the most outspoken voices against slavery in pre–Civil War America, he challenged both church and society with his radical beliefs. While most ministers of...
When the US entered World War II in 1941, Americans were called to do their part for the war effort. Factories shifted production to weapons, families rationed food, and ordinary people were urged to donate blood for wounded soldiers....
Amos Dresser was a minister and abolitionist who, in 1835, while traveling in the South to raise money for his education, was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, and publicly whipped, not for any violent act, but for the “crime” of...
On August 8, 1946, just one year after returning home from serving his country in World War II, United States Army Corporal John Cecil Jones was tortured and lynched by a white mob near Minden, Webster Parish, Louisiana. He...
