Lewis Temple was a Black American blacksmith and inventor whose work changed the way people hunted whales in the 19th century. In 1848, he developed an improved harpoon that made it harder for a whale to escape after being...
Wade Perrin was ordered to dance, sing and pray by a group of white men before they told him to run for his life. As he ran, they shot him dead. His crime was being a Black politician who...
Joe Woodman was a Black sawmill worker in Arkansas who was lynched in July 1905 after eloping with a white girl. After the couple were found and brought back to Dumas, Woodman was locked in jail. During the night,...
Benjamin Lay was an English-born abolitionist who spent his life fighting slavery and challenging Christians who owned enslaved people. Through public protests and his 1737 book, All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, he condemned their hypocrisy...
On September 7, 1889, a white mob broke into the Boone County Jail in Columbia, Missouri, seized a Black teenager named George Bush and hanged him from a second-story window of the county courthouse. Bush was just 17 or...
In October 1906, a wave of racial violence swept through Argenta, Arkansas, after a white farmer was shot and killed. Over the next four days, armed white mobs attacked Black residents, burned homes and businesses, and forced many families...
In the years before the American Civil War, slavery was not only defended by politicians and slaveholders. Some Christian ministers also built theological arguments around it, using the Bible to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity. One of...
In December 1869, a young Black man named Cyrus Guy was taken by a white mob in Orange County, North Carolina, and lynched for allegedly insulting a white woman. There was no trial, no opportunity for Guy to defend...
In 1712, colonial South Carolina passed a law establishing increasingly severe punishments for enslaved people who repeatedly ran away. The law, titled “An ACT for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and Slaves,” treated escape as an offense...
In December 1922, the small town of Perry, Florida, became the scene of a wave of racial violence after the murder of a white schoolteacher. Over the following two weeks, white mobs killed several Black men, burned Black homes...
