In December 1765, Charleston, South Carolina, was thrown into chaos when rumors of an impending slave insurrection by enslaved Africans disrupted the city’s Christmas festivities. The fear of rebellion cast a shadow over the season’s celebrations, leaving white residents...
Louis Hughes, was one of the many enslaved African Americans who experienced the horrors of slavery in the United States. Hughes’ story, recounted in his memoir Thirty Years a Slave, reveals the cruelty of a system that dehumanized African...
Lynching was one of the most brutal tools of racial terror in the United States, serving as a public spectacle of white supremacy and a tool of social control over African Americans. Between the late 19th century and well...
On April 27, 1899, in Leesburg, Georgia, Mitchell Daniel, a Black community leader, was lynched by white neighbors in what became another dark chapter of racial terror in the United States. His “crime” was talking too much about the...
Richard Dickerson was an African American laborer living in Springfield, Ohio, whose lynching by a white mob on March 7, 1904 became the catalyst for further racial violence, including the targeted destruction of Black-owned businesses in the city’s “Levee”...
In colonial Maryland in 1681, a young Irish woman named Eleanor Butler, also known as Irish Nell, made a bold and controversial decision that would forever change her life. At just 16 years old, she defied societal norms by...
During the era of chattel slavery in the United States, Southern states actively suppressed the education of African Americans, both enslaved and free. Alabama, like many other states, recognized literacy as a potential threat to the institution of slavery....
The Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, is a Catholic religious order renowned for its commitment to education, missionary work, and theological scholarship. However, their history includes a troubling chapter: the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved Africans to...
Phillis, was an enslaved African woman in colonial Massachusetts, who was executed by burning at the stake in 1755. Alongside her with another enslaved man, Mark, she was accused of poisoning her abusive enslaver, John Codman, in retaliation for...
William Gibbons, born around 1825 in Albemarle County, Virginia, was an African American who was enslaved by a professor at the University of Virginia.
