The Vicksburg massacre was one of the longest and deadliest attacks on freed Black Americans during the Reconstruction era. Beginning on December 7, 1874, and continuing until around January 5, 1875, the violence in Vicksburg, Mississippi left an estimated...
Among the many forgotten names buried in America’s history of slavery, few stories are as disturbing as that of Ginger Pop, an enslaved African man whose life ended brutally on a Louisiana plantation in 1853. His death, and the...
In the afternoon of February 15, 1851, inside a federal courthouse, an enslaved African man named Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped slavery in Virginia less than a year earlier, was being held under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of...
William Davenport was one of the most prolific slave traders in British history. Operating out of Liverpool, he organized numerous voyages that transported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean. By the sheer scale...
Ella Abomah Williams was born in South Carolina in 1865 to enslaved parents, arriving just as the nation abolished slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment, which also freed newborns like her. Gifted with extraordinary height and a commanding presence, she...
Edmund Ruffin was a Virginia planter, politician, and fierce pro-slavery advocate, who spent his life defending the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the South lay in ruins, millions of enslaved Black...
On November 21, 1985, the township of Mamelodi, near Pretoria, became the scene of one of the darkest episodes of apartheid in South Africa. Thirteen Black South Africans were killed, and dozens more wounded, when apartheid police opened fire...
In the heart of the 19th century, when most Black people in America were still denied education, freedom, and basic human rights, one man managed to carve his name into the pages of American innovation. His name was Henry...
In the early evening of June 15, 1930, Atlanta, Georgia, witnessed a tragedy that would haunt the city for decades. Dennis T. Hubert, an 18-year-old sophomore at Morehouse College, was lynched on the playground of the segregated Crogman School....
The transatlantic slave trade was one of history’s darkest enterprises, carrying millions of Africans across the ocean in brutal conditions to serve as labor in the Americas. The ships that ferried them were not just centers of commerce but...
