Octavius Valentine Catto was a gifted educator, civil rights activist, and community leader, who dedicated his life to the upliftment of Black Americans through education, political participation, and equal rights. His remarkable achievements and unwavering activism, however, made him...
On June 30, 1905, the town of Watkinsville, Georgia, became the site of one of the most horrific acts of racial violence in American history. That night, a large mob seized nine men from the Oconee County jail and...
Dred Scott was an enslaved African man in the United States who became the central figure in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases in American history, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). His life began in bondage, and...
In the United States before the Civil War, slavery was not only a social system but also a business. Every part of enslaved life was measured and turned into profit. From the crops they grew to the children they...
In April 1892, Henry and Ephraim Grizzard, two African American brothers from Middle Tennessee, were lynched after being accused of assaulting two white sisters in Goodlettsville. The charges were never proven, yet both men were killed by white mobs...
When the United States Congress voted to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many hoped it would signal a decline in the horrors of slavery. But instead of ending human bondage, this legal milestone gave rise to one...
In the early hours of September 11, 1851, long before the first rooster crowed over Christiana, Pennsylvania, a group of armed white men climbed the hill to William Parker’s home. They came with warrants. They came with chains. They...
Henrietta Smith Bowers Duterte was a pioneering African-American funeral home owner, philanthropist, and courageous abolitionist from Philadelphia who turned her profession into a powerful tool of resistance, smuggling freedom through the very rituals meant to honor the dead. She...
Basil Manly Sr. was more than a Southern preacher, he was one of the most vocal and influential theological defenders of American slavery. A prominent Baptist minister, university president, and the author of the infamous Alabama Resolutions, Manly’s beliefs...
Lewis C. Robards was a slave trader who ran a slave jail in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became notorious for trafficking what the white slave trade called “fancy girls”, light-skinned Black girls and women who were specifically sold for...
