Long before African countries began gaining independence from European colonial powers, Africans were already organizing against colonial rule. One of the early figures in that struggle was André Matsoua, a Congolese political activist who challenged French colonial rule decades...
In 1662, the colony of Virginia passed a law that changed the future of slavery in North America. It declared that the status of a child would be determined by the condition of the mother. If an enslaved African...
Isaiah Nixon was a World War II veteran, a husband, a father of six and a farmer in Montgomery County, Georgia. He had served his country overseas and returned home hoping to build a quiet life with his family....
In December 1941, African miners in the Belgian Congo went on strike to demand higher wages. The cost of living had risen sharply during the Second World War, while African workers were earning far less than their European counterparts....
In the summer of 1955, Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was looking forward to spending part of his school vacation with relatives in Mississippi. He was born on July 25, 1941, and had grown...
In 1890, a Black American travelled deep into Central Africa expecting to witness one of Europe’s great civilizing projects. Instead, he encountered forced labour, violence and terror that would become one of the greatest scandals of European colonialism. His...
When European powers began their rush to conquer Africa in the nineteenth century, they did not enter a completely unknown continent. Long before European armies arrived to establish colonial administrations, missionaries had already travelled deep into African territories, established...
In the early 1940s, a young girl from the Casamance region of Senegal became one of the most influential spiritual figures in her community. Her name was Aline Sitoé Diatta. A Diola spiritual leader, she would eventually become known...
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...
