At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earn…
As the Civil War was drawing to a close, President Lincoln was preparing for what came after, with plans for reunification of the country, and he began to advocate for limited suffrage for Black Americans. John Wilkes Booth’…
In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends were…
In the early 20th century, career options for Black workers were limited, and the jobs often came with low pay and poor conditions. Ironically, because they were concentrated in certain jobs, Black workers sometimes monopol…
On August 27, 1893, a massive hurricane struck the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, battering the Sea Islands and Lowcountry through the next morning. Around 2,000 people in the thriving African American community perish…
After the Civil War, the simultaneous shift in the labor economy of the Southern United States and the second industrial revolution led to a growing interest in labor organizing. Newly formed labor organizations led a combin…
When Alabama plantation owner Samuel Townsend died in 1856, he willed his vast fortune to his children and his nieces. What seems like an ordinary bequest was anything but, since Townsend’s children and nieces were his ensla…
During Reconstruction, cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta recruited Chinese laborers to work on their plantations, to replace the emancipated slaves who had previously done the hard labor. However, the Chinese workers …
One hundred fifty years ago, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act establishing Yellowstone National Park into law, making it the first national park in the United States, and a cause for celebration in a country still re…
When the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee (or Creek), and Seminole Nations – known as “The Five Civilized Tribes” by white settlers – were forcibly moved from their lands in the Southeastern United States to Indian Ter…
Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848. With the help of family members, she was educated and escaped, joining the Union army at the age of 14, to serve ostensibly as a laundress, but in reality as a nurs…
