Carl Braden was an journalist who spent much of his life challenging racism and segregation in America. His activism made him one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most committed white allies, but it also brought surveillance, blacklisting, and prison...
James Gillespie Birney was not born an abolitionist. He once owned enslaved Africans and lived within the slaveholding world before eventually turning against it. After freeing those he still held, Birney founded The Philanthropist, an anti-slavery newspaper that made...
In the early twentieth century, as the Herero and Nama genocide was still unfolding in German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, another form of violence was taking root across farms and settler communities. Among the men who would later...
Thousands of enslaved Africans were imprisoned inside the dark underground dungeons of Cape Coast Castle in colonial Ghana before being forced onto slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Directly above one of those dungeons stood the Church of England Chapel,...
In colonial Kenya during the 1950s, the British government built a vast network of detention camps to imprison Africans accused of resisting colonial rule. Hidden within the hills of Nyeri was one of those sites, Aguthi Concentration Camp, a...
Throughout the Atlantic slave world, slaveholders often promoted Christianity among enslaved Africans believing religion would encourage obedience, humility, and submission. Plantation owners funded chapels, welcomed missionaries, and encouraged Bible teaching partly because they believed Christian instruction would make enslaved...
The Massasoit Guards were an African American militia company founded in Boston in 1854 to help protect the city’s Black community from slave catchers during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Formed by Black abolitionists at...
In the early nineteenth century, European audiences gathered to stare at a young African woman whose body had been turned into a spectacle. She was advertised, examined, and reduced to an object of curiosity. That woman was Sarah Baartman,...
William Henry Brisbane Sr. was a Baptist pastor in the slaveholding South who built his life on enslaved labor before turning against the very system that enriched him. In a society where slavery was deeply accepted, even among religious...
In the mid nineteenth century, when slavery still dominated much of the United States, a small number of Black professionals began using the law to fight the system. One of the most remarkable among them was Robert Morris, a...
