In the early hours of September 24, 1906, the body of a 30 year old Black man named Zeb Long was found hanging from a tree in East Point, Georgia. His death was not the result of any alleged...
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer Sr. was not a national celebrity of the Civil Rights Movement, but his work struck at the very heart of white supremacy in Mississippi. At a time when Black political participation was met with terror, Dahmer...
For millions of enslaved Black families in the United States, January 1 was never a day of joy. While the world around them celebrated the New Year with music, laughter, and hope, enslaved families faced dread and sorrow. They...
Rev. Thornton Stringfellow was the pastor of Stevensburg Baptist Church in Culpeper County, Virginia, and one of the most notorious defenders of slavery in antebellum America. While he also promoted Sunday Schools, and domestic missions, his enduring legacy is...
During the Jim Crow era, segregation depended on strict racial categories: a person was either Black or white, inferior or superior, barred or welcomed. Rev. Jesse Routte exposed the idiocy of that system in a remarkable way, not through...
Cordella Stevenson was a Black woman living in rural Mississippi. In 1915, after her son was suspected of a crime he didn’t commit, a white mob kidnapped and lynched her, leaving her body hanging in public. No one was...
Anarcha Westcott was an enslaved African woman whose life and suffering became central to the development of modern gynecology. For decades, her story was nearly invisible, surviving only in the writings of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the physician who...
The Vicksburg massacre was one of the longest and deadliest attacks on freed Black Americans during the Reconstruction era. Beginning on December 7, 1874, and continuing until around January 5, 1875, the violence in Vicksburg, Mississippi left an estimated...
In the afternoon of February 15, 1851, inside a federal courthouse, an enslaved African man named Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped slavery in Virginia less than a year earlier, was being held under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of...
Ella Abomah Williams was born in South Carolina in 1865 to enslaved parents, arriving just as the nation abolished slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment, which also freed newborns like her. Gifted with extraordinary height and a commanding presence, she...
