For decades in the mid 19th century, a brick slave jail in Lynchburg, Virginia, functioned as one of the busiest holding points in the domestic slave trade of the Upper South. Enslaved Africa men, women, and children were confined...
Throughout American history, politicians, plantation owners, lawyers, and religious leaders all offered different arguments in defense of slavery. Some claimed it was necessary for the economy, while others argued that it maintained social order. Few, however, relied as heavily...
Rebecca Latimer Felton remains one of the most contradictory figures in American history. She is often remembered as the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. Conversely, that milestone sits beside a far darker reality. Felton was...
In 1829, a free Black abolitionist living in Boston published a pamphlet that would send waves of fear through parts of slaveholding America. It was not a government report, a newspaper investigation, or a speech from a famous politician....
Carl Braden was an journalist who spent much of his life challenging racism and segregation in America. His activism made him one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most committed white allies, but it also brought surveillance, blacklisting, and prison...
James Gillespie Birney was not born an abolitionist. He once owned enslaved Africans and lived within the slaveholding world before eventually turning against it. After freeing those he still held, Birney founded The Philanthropist, an anti-slavery newspaper that made...
Throughout the Atlantic slave world, slaveholders often promoted Christianity among enslaved Africans believing religion would encourage obedience, humility, and submission. Plantation owners funded chapels, welcomed missionaries, and encouraged Bible teaching partly because they believed Christian instruction would make enslaved...
The Massasoit Guards were an African American militia company founded in Boston in 1854 to help protect the city’s Black community from slave catchers during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Formed by Black abolitionists at...
William Henry Brisbane Sr. was a Baptist pastor in the slaveholding South who built his life on enslaved labor before turning against the very system that enriched him. In a society where slavery was deeply accepted, even among religious...
In the mid nineteenth century, when slavery still dominated much of the United States, a small number of Black professionals began using the law to fight the system. One of the most remarkable among them was Robert Morris, a...
