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...
Church was a formerly enslaved man who rose to become one of the first Black millionaires in American history. In an era when racial violence was common and Black Americans were largely shut out of wealth and power, he...
In early 1861, as the United States moved toward civil war, a respected rabbi in New York shocked many Americans when he opened the Bible and argued that slavery was allowed by God. In a sermon that quickly spread...
In the history of American slavery, some slaveholders are remembered not because of the wealth they accumulated but because of the suffering they inflicted on the Africans they enslaved. One such figure was “Big Jim” McClain, a slave master...
