At a time when Kentucky was a slave state and many churches either defended slavery or remained silent, John Gregg Fee preached that slavery was a sin against both God and humanity. For that, he was disowned by his...
George W. Lee was a Baptist minister, businessman, and civil rights leader who became one of Mississippi’s leading advocates for Black voting rights. His efforts to help African Americans register to vote challenged the foundations of Jim Crow, and...
Rev Frederick Augustus Ross, was a Presbyterian minister whose 1857 book, Slavery As Ordained of God, became one of the most influential religious defenses of slavery in the United States. While abolitionists argued that slavery violated both Christian teaching...
History often remembers inventors for the machines they built, but some left behind a legacy that went far beyond their patents. Thomas Elkins was one of them. Long before his name appeared on U.S. patent documents, he was helping...
In 1934, in the Jim Crow South, a Black man could lose his life for almost anything. Looking a white person in the eye, refusing to step off a sidewalk, or arguing with a white man could be enough...
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...
