A group of white men pose for a 1919 photograph as they stand over the black victim Will Brown who had been lynched and had his body mutilated and burned during the Omaha race riot of 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. No …
Colored movie theater, Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939
A black man goes into the “colored” entrance of a movie theater in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939.
Haitian Slave Rebellion 1791-1804
In 1789, Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue. It was a French colony, which through the brutal application of slave labor had become responsible for producing 60% of the world’s coffee and 40% of the world’s sugar, effectively making the slave …
Denmark Vesey
By 1822, pro-slavery American Conservatives had for decades portrayed themselves as Christian gentlemen, as reasonable men, who, if anything, were doing their enslaved African property a favor by keeping them as slaves. For they sincerely believed that Africans were inherently …
Christianity and Enslaved Africans in the United States (Part 1 of 2)
So first we talked about a slave rebellion where the majority of the enslaved Africans were African born and drew inspiration from their indigenous African religions. (Haitian Revolution)Then we talked about a conspiracy to start a slave rebellion that was …
Christianity and Enslaved Africans in the United States (part 2 of 2)
In 1828, American Conservatives were still debating the pros and cons of Christianizing enslaved Africans. It had only been 6 years since Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy had been suppressed in South Carolina. And there were still those factions of white conservatives …
Nat Turner: The Man God Asked to Fight the Serpent
We are on a plantation owned by a man named Benjamin Turner, and on this plantation is a young enslaved African named Nat that is being Christianized.Nat’s father had escaped north when Nat was still a young boy. His grandmother, …
What the 4th of July meant to the enslaved African
“Every law that defined slaves as property, every racist treatise declaring blacks inferior, every southern white man’s dream of upward mobility, rested on the presence of large numbers of blacks, but not on an understanding or familiarity with them.”– Oakes, …
The Legend of Dinkie the Conjurer!
Whenever human beings interact, they rub off on one another. The ways in which they rub off on one another can rarely be predicted. When this involves large groups of people over extended periods of time this often leads to …
Miscegenation in the Antebellum South
Sexual relations between Blacks and Whites was the worst kept secret about the institution of slavery. Consider this quote from Mary Chesnut, “Our men seem to think themselves patterns – models of husbands and fathers. But in reality, like the …
The Myth of Benevolent Slavery
There are always those who you will come across from time to time who seem to have been raised to believe that something called Benevolent Slavery existed. That sure, there were horrible Masters, but there most certainly were good masters …
“Ain’t I a Woman?”
Until you read a slave narrative or two you really don’t have any idea really, just how oppressive slavery was. How its vile sickness seeped into and touched every single aspect of a slave’s life. Most of us just think …