Henrietta Smith Bowers Duterte was a pioneering African-American funeral home owner, philanthropist, and courageous abolitionist from Philadelphia who turned her profession into a powerful tool of resistance, smuggling freedom through the very rituals meant to honor the dead. She...
Basil Manly Sr. was more than a Southern preacher, he was one of the most vocal and influential theological defenders of American slavery. A prominent Baptist minister, university president, and the author of the infamous Alabama Resolutions, Manly’s beliefs...
Lewis C. Robards was a slave trader who ran a slave jail in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became notorious for trafficking what the white slave trade called “fancy girls”, light-skinned Black girls and women who were specifically sold for...
On the morning of March 28, 1941, deep in a wooded ravine at Fort Benning, Georgia, the lifeless body of Private Felix Hall was discovered. He had been hanging from a tree by a noose, his hands tied behind...
Charles Turner Torrey was an American pastor, journalist, and one of the most daring and politically-minded abolitionists of the 19th century. He played a major role in the fight against slavery by organizing direct actions to help enslaved Africans...
On the night of June 15, 1920, a white mob in Duluth, Minnesota, dragged three African-American circus workers from jail, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, and lynched them in front of thousands. The men had been falsely...
George Whitefield is remembered as one of the most influential preachers of the 18th century. A co-founder of Methodism alongside John and Charles Wesley and a major force in the First Great Awakening, Whitefield’s legacy is often told as...
Throughout the brutal centuries of American slavery, resistance was as common as the oppression itself. Enslaved Africans did not passively accept their bondage; they rebelled, sometimes in open defiance, other times in carefully organized revolts that struck at the...
When the U.S. banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, Southern plantation owners could no longer import Africans. To meet rising demand for labour, they turned inward, breeding enslaved Africans already in the country. At the heart of this...
In late January 1934, Robert Johnson, a 40-year-old Black man, was wrongly arrested for assaulting a white woman in Tampa, Florida. Although the police eventually cleared him of any involvement, a white mob seized him and lynched him before...
