In 1712, colonial South Carolina passed a law establishing increasingly severe punishments for enslaved people who repeatedly ran away. The law, titled “An ACT for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and Slaves,” treated escape as an offense...
In February 1763, enslaved Africans in Berbice, a Dutch colony in present-day Guyana, rose against the brutal plantation system that had kept them in bondage, launching one of the most significant slave revolts in 18th-century South America. What began...
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...
