On May 11, 1926, Henry Patterson walked toward the home of a white woman in LaBelle, Florida, and asked for a drink of water. Patterson was a 22 year old Black road construction worker who had arrived in the...
Samory Touré was an African king who built the powerful Wassoulou Empire across parts of present-day Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. For roughly 17 years, he resisted French colonial expansion through military resistance, diplomacy and...
On October 28, 1830, Josiah Henson crossed into Canada with his wife, Nancy, and their children, escaping slavery in the United States. But Henson’s journey did not end with his own freedom. He went on to help other Black...
Moses “Daddy Moses” Wilkinson’s life was an extraordinary journey from slavery in Virginia to religious leadership in Africa. Born enslaved, Wilkinson escaped during the American Revolutionary War, became a Methodist preacher, led a congregation in Nova Scotia, and eventually...
George Boxley was a white American abolitionist and former slaveholder who turned against slavery and allegedly sought to lead one of Virginia’s most ambitious slave revolts. His plan to free enslaved Africans and seize key cities never materialized after...
Slavery produced countless victims and countless perpetrators. Most slave owners faded into obscurity, but Edwin Epps remains infamous because one of the men he enslaved survived to tell the world exactly what happened on his plantation. His memoir, Twelve...
When people think of slavery in America, they often picture plantation owners, politicians, and traders. Few imagine that some of slavery’s most passionate defenders stood behind church pulpits. One of the most influential was Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a celebrated...
Born into slavery around 1800 in Hoosick, New York, Myers rose from bondage to become one of the most important abolitionists in the state. For more than two decades, he and his wife Harriet transformed their home in Albany...
Louis Rwagasore was a Burundian prince, nationalist leader, and the country’s first elected Prime Minister who became the face of Burundi’s independence movement and pushed for an immediate end to Belgian colonial rule in the late 1950s and early...
Mekatilili wa Menza was a Kenyan anti-colonial leader from the Giriama people who became one of the most formidable opponents of British rule in East Africa during the early twentieth century. Her resistance to colonial policies was so influential...
