Category: Slavery

  — Diana Brown, How Stuff Works Slavery is a stain on nearly every nation’s history book. And it’s been abolished by law in 167 countries. Unfortunately, despite these laws, the abhorrent practice still continues today, with 2017 estimates suggesting that more than 40 million people worldwide are victims of some form of modern slavery. Stuff They Don’t Want […]

  — Dave Roos, How Stuff Works On April 9, 1865, the long and bloody American Civil War finally came to an end. It had already been two years since President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but after the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, word slowly spread among the more than 4 million enslaved Black men, women […]

  — Dave Roos, How Stuff Works On Aug. 15, 1818, a baby girl named Bridget was born into slavery in Georgia. She was sold as an infant to new masters who called her Biddy. When Biddy turned 18, she was presented as a wedding gift to Robert Marion Smith and his wife Rebecca in Mississippi. This […]

By EJI Staff, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative The stage was set for slavery in the United States as early as the 14th century when Spain and Portugal began to capture Africans for enslavement in Europe. Slavery eventually expanded to colonial America, where the first enslaved Africans were brought in the Virginia colony at Point Comfort on […]

Three daughters of Missouri slaves who were born in Bozeman in the 1870s quietly worked to advance the standing of Black people in Montana. By Gail Schontzler, Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Associated Press, U.S. News BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — Bozeman was a scrappy upstart wild West town in the fall of 1864 when Richard and Mary McDonald, a […]

By Jonathan Forani, CTV News TORONTO — A pregnant teen escaping captivity in a wintry Quebec. A young woman forced to pose nude for a painter in Montreal. The son of a free man tied up in a Toronto shed. These are Canadian stories, just a few among hundreds of Black slave narratives from the […]

On April 7, 1712, a coalition of enslaved black people in New York City set fire to a building in the city center and launched a revolt. Armed with hatchets, knives, and guns, they attacked white people who came to fight the fire, killing nine and injuring seven. During the early 18th century, New York […]

In early 1851, Thomas Sims, an enslaved black man living in Savannah, Georgia, successfully escaped bondage and fled to Boston, Massachusetts — where slavery had been abolished. Only a few weeks later, on April 3, 1851, Sims was arrested by a United States Marshal and members of the local police force and taken to the […]