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...
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...
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...
Rosa Lee Ingram was a widowed African American mother of twelve children and a hardworking sharecropper who lived in the deep South during one of the harshest times for Black women in America. In the 1940s, her name became...
On November 16, 1900, a crowd of over three hundred white men gathered near Limon, Colorado, to watch a horrifying spectacle. A 15-year-old Black boy named Preston John Porter Jr. was chained to a steel rail and burned alive....
Andrew Jackson Beard was an African American inventor whose brilliance shone despite being born into a world that denied him education. A self-taught genius, Beard created life-saving innovations in agriculture and railroad engineering, leaving behind a legacy that still...
In an era when many pastors stood on the fence, or worse, used the Bible to justify slavery with verses like “Slaves, obey your masters as you would Jesus”, one man chose to defy both his peers and the...
