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...
The Robert Charles riots of 1900, remain one of the most violent and racially charged events in New Orleans history. The conflict began after African-American laborer Robert Charles was confronted by police whose provocative tactics and heavy-handed enforcement led...
Long before European ships anchored on the southern coast of Africa, the San people, hunter-gatherers whose ancestors had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, roamed the open plains freely. They were among the earliest inhabitants...
The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 was one of the most important and tragic events in Jamaica’s history. It began in the small parish of St. Thomas-in-the-East, where years of poverty, unfair laws, and racism had pushed people to...
The John Rankin House in Ripley, Ohio, is a historic brick home that played an important role in the Underground Railroad during the early 19th century. More than just a residence, it became one of the earliest and most...
In his 1956 classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp shattered the myth of slavery as a gentle system. Using plantation records, letters, and slave narratives, he revealed that white enslavers deliberately sought...
