In the year 1883, as European empires tightened their grip on Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium issued a letter to colonial missionaries that would later come to symbolize the most chilling fusion of religious evangelism and imperial conquest....
Paul Robeson was a celebrated African American singer, actor, and activist whose outspoken criticism of racism and support for socialism led to him being blacklisted and ostracized by the US in 1950.
Paul Robeson was born on April 9, 1898,...
The transatlantic slave trade, one of history’s darkest chapters, was marked not only by brutality and dehumanization but also by resistance, which was often sparked by the terrifying unknowns that Africans faced once captured and placed aboard European slave...
The Boston Vigilance Committee, formed in 1841, was a rugged organization in the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts. Its mission was simple: to protect escaped enslaved Africans from being captured and returned to slavery in the Southern United States. Operating...
In the late 19th century, as European powers carved up Africa during the Scramble for Africa, many African leaders rose to resist colonial oppression. One such hero was Mangi Meli of the Chagga people in present-day Tanzania. His courageous...
Cesar Picton was a formerly enslaved African child, taken from Senegambia in West Africa and gifted to a British politician. He rose to become a wealthy coal merchant and property owner in 18th- and 19th-century England, defying the odds...
Shields Green, also known as “Emperor,” was one of the most enigmatic figures in the fight against slavery in the United States. An escaped slave from Charleston, South Carolina, Green became a close associate of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and...
King Toera was the last independent ruler of the Menabe region in western Madagascar who was executed by French colonial forces in 1897 during their conquest of the island. After initially extending hospitality to the French, he was met...
During the early 20th century, when lynching was a widespread tool of racial terror in the United States, a determined group of women formed the Anti-Lynching Crusaders to combat this horrific practice. This organization, established in 1922 as an...
Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were not just slave traders; they were industrialists of human misery and were the most influential and ruthless slave traders in the history of the United States. Operating in the 1820s and 1830s, they...
