Theodore Parker was far from a typical 19th-century preacher. A bold reformer and one of the most outspoken voices against slavery in pre–Civil War America, he challenged both church and society with his radical beliefs. While most ministers of...
Amos Dresser was a minister and abolitionist who, in 1835, while traveling in the South to raise money for his education, was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, and publicly whipped, not for any violent act, but for the “crime” of...
The scramble auction was one of the most inhumane and chaotic forms of selling enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. This method of auction had a fixed price system: every captive cost the same, no bidding allowed. That...
Dred Scott was an enslaved African man in the United States who became the central figure in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases in American history, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). His life began in bondage, and...
Long before Central Park became New York City’s most iconic green space, its land was home to a thriving, self-sufficient settlement known as Seneca Village. Founded in 1825 by free African Americans, the community represented one of the first...
In the United States before the Civil War, slavery was not only a social system but also a business. Every part of enslaved life was measured and turned into profit. From the crops they grew to the children they...
Elijah Parish Lovejoy was a white preacher with a printing press and a dangerous habit, telling the truth about slavery. In 1837, a mob stormed the warehouse where he kept his press. He stood his ground, they shot him...
When the United States Congress voted to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many hoped it would signal a decline in the horrors of slavery. But instead of ending human bondage, this legal milestone gave rise to one...
In the early hours of September 11, 1851, long before the first rooster crowed over Christiana, Pennsylvania, a group of armed white men climbed the hill to William Parker’s home. They came with warrants. They came with chains. They...
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...
