AP-Level African American Studies

A collector's sentence, 1925

On 1 March 1925, a New York magazine called the Survey Graphic gave a whole issue to Harlem, under the title "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." One of its essays came from Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a collector born in Puerto Rico in 1874 to a Puerto Rican father and a mother from St. Croix. He had come to New York in 1891. For more than twenty years he had spent what he could spare on books, pamphlets, prints and manuscripts by and about people of African descent. Later that year the issue's guest editor, the philosopher Alain Locke, reprinted the essay in his anthology The New Negro. It opens like this:

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. ... History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset.

Schomburg wrote "Negro," the respectful word of his day; Lesson 9 follows how that word gave way to others. Now look at his verb. To remake a past is not to invent one. He meant that the real past of African-descended people had been scattered, buried or denied, and that someone had to dig it up, prove it and teach it.

He did that work himself. In 1926 the Carnegie Corporation gave the New York Public Library $10,000 to buy his collection of more than 10,000 items. Schomburg became curator of the library's Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints in 1932 and served until his death in 1938. The collection grew into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which now holds more than 11 million items.

His sentence sets up the problem this lesson works through. This is a course about African Americans, people whose story unfolds in what became the United States. Yet it opens in Africa, thousands of miles away and many centuries before 1619. Why start there? And what kind of evidence lets you answer that question with facts rather than with pride or prejudice? Schomburg's own essay gives the first part of the answer.

Three conclusions from the archive

By 1925, Schomburg wrote, the study of the Black past had come out of "rhetoric and propaganda" and become "systematic and scientific." Three conclusions, he said, had now been established:

First, that the Negro has been throughout the centuries of controversy an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement. ... Second, that by virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly. Third, that the remote racial origins of the Negro, far from being what the race and the world have been given to understand, offer a record of credible group achievement when scientifically viewed ...

Put into today's language, those findings become three habits this course will ask of you. The first is to look for agency, the power to act and choose even under heavy constraint. Enslaved and free Black people ran away, sued, petitioned, preached, wrote, organized and fought, often before any ally took up their cause. When a source shows only suffering, ask what the people in it were doing.

The second habit is to look past the famous exception to the group behind it. It is easy to treat a Phillis Wheatley or a Frederick Douglass as a marvel who rose above everyone else. Schomburg saw that this praised individuals while erasing the churches, schools, lodges and newspapers that produced them. This course keeps pairing famous names with the communities around them.

The third habit is to go further back than slavery. The "remote origins" Schomburg meant are the cities, empires, scholars and kinship systems of Africa, the subject of this first module. He packed his method into one line: "an ounce of fact is worth a pound of controversy." He described an exhibition at Harlem's public library whose cases of rare books and prints "simply said, to skeptic and believer alike," that here was the evidence.

Key idea: Schomburg argued that the Black past had to be recovered from evidence. His three conclusions, about agency, about the group behind each famous individual, and about deep African origins, shape how this course reads every source.

A field made of many fields

African American studies is not one discipline. It is a meeting place for several. A historian asks what happened and why. A literary scholar asks how a poem or a slave narrative makes its meaning. An art historian reads a quilt, a photograph or a carved mask. A geographer maps where people were taken and where they later moved. A political theorist weighs arguments about freedom, citizenship and nationhood.

The College Board describes its AP course as interdisciplinary and built on direct encounters with varied sources, which reveal how diverse African American experiences have been. Every lesson here works the same way. You read the source first, then the scholars who interpret it, and then you decide what the evidence supports.

The work is older than the university departments that now house it. Schomburg was a collector, not a professor. Formal programs came only after student protest. In 1968 the sociologist Nathan Hare became the first director of the Black Studies program at San Francisco State College. A five-month strike led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front followed. In 1969 the college established a School of Ethnic Studies, the first of its kind in the nation. Lesson 31 returns to that story.

The AP framework arranges the field in four units. The table sets them beside the modules of this course that teach them.

Four themes run through all four units: migration and the African diaspora; intersections of identity; creativity, expression and the arts; and resistance and resilience. The framework also names three skills. Applying disciplinary knowledge means explaining developments and their contexts. Source analysis means weighing written and visual sources and data. Argumentation means making a claim and supporting it with evidence through a line of reasoning.

The AP exam lasts 2 hours and 40 minutes. It has 60 multiple-choice questions, asked in sets built on sources, plus short-answer questions and a document-based question with five documents. An individual research project on four related sources counts for 10 percent of the score and is scored by your teacher. A self-paced course cannot give you that score or a teacher's feedback. It can give you the knowledge and the habits the exam is built to test.

Key idea: African American studies joins history, literature, the arts, geography and political thought. The AP course arranges it in four chronological units, with four themes and three skills running through them.

One diaspora, many destinations

Diaspora comes from a Greek word for scattering. It names a people dispersed far from a homeland who keep some sense of connection to it and to one another. For people of African descent, the largest dispersal was forced. The SlaveVoyages project, run by a consortium of universities, has compiled records of more than 36,000 slaving voyages across the Atlantic between 1514 and 1866. From those records, and from estimates for voyages whose records are lost, it calculates that about 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard ships between 1501 and 1866. About 10.7 million survived to land.

Where did they land? The table gives the project's estimates for people who survived the crossing, by broad region.

Read the table slowly, because it overturns a common assumption. Mainland North America, the region that became the United States, received fewer than one in twenty-five of the Africans who survived the crossing. Brazil received more than twelve times as many. Most of the diaspora's history of slavery, culture-making and resistance unfolded south of the United States. That is why this course keeps crossing borders: to Haiti in Lesson 10, to Brazil in Lesson 12, and to Harlem's Caribbean newcomers in Lesson 21.

The people who landed in North America did not come from "Africa" in general. They came from particular coasts, and Lesson 5 works through those numbers. Genetics points the same way. A 2009 study led by Sarah Tishkoff sampled African Americans in Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and North Carolina. It estimated their ancestry at about 71 percent from a population cluster most common in western Africa, about 13 percent European and about 8 percent other African. Those shares varied widely from one person to the next.

Key idea: African Americans are one branch of a diaspora that went mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean. Mainland North America received about 3.6 percent of the Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing.

A continent of zones

Africa is the second-largest continent on Earth, and it is not one landscape. National Geographic's educators describe it in bands. The Sahara, the world's largest hot desert, covers about 8.5 million square kilometers, roughly a quarter of the continent. South of it runs the Sahel, a narrow strip of semi-arid land about 5,400 kilometers long, from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east. Below the Sahel stretch the savannas, grasslands dotted with trees. They cover more than 13 million square kilometers, almost half of Africa.

Dense rainforest, the landscape many outsiders picture first, fills a much smaller share, most of it in Central Africa. There are also highlands, such as Ethiopia's, cut by the Great Rift Valley, and great rivers: the Nile, the Niger and the Congo. Today the African Union counts 55 member states on the continent, each with its own history, and most with many languages inside its borders.

These zones shaped how people lived and how history moved. Camel caravans crossed the Sahara for centuries, and trading cities grew along its southern edge, where the caravan routes met the Niger River. Farmers and herders worked the savannas. Rivers carried canoes and trade long before any modern road was built. Lesson 2 follows the empires that rose along those routes, and Lesson 4 follows the trade of the Indian Ocean coast.

Key idea: Africa is a continent of zones. Savanna covers almost half of it and the Sahara about a quarter, while rainforest covers far less than most people imagine.

Many peoples, many languages

Africa's human variety matches its landscapes. Tishkoff's team noted that Africa contains more than 2,000 distinct ethnolinguistic groups, speaking nearly a third of the world's languages. An ethnolinguistic group is a people defined by a shared language and a shared sense of identity. Linguists sort most of these languages into four large families. Niger-Kordofanian, also called Niger-Congo, is spoken across a broad region. Afroasiatic is spoken mainly in the Sahara, the northeast and the east. Nilo-Saharan is spoken in Sudanic, Saharan and eastern Africa. Khoesan, the languages with click consonants, is spoken in southern Africa and by the Hadza and Sandawe of eastern Africa.

How did one family come to cover so much ground? The answer is the Bantu expansion. Beginning 4,000 to 5,000 years ago near today's border between Nigeria and Cameroon, farming communities spread south and east, carrying their languages with them. A 2022 study by Ezequiel Koile and colleagues tested four possible routes using the basic vocabulary of 419 languages. The best-supported route ran straight through the Central African rainforest about 4,400 years ago, rather than around it.

The result is visible on any language map today. More than 500 Bantu languages, among them Kikongo, Kimbundu, Swahili, Zulu and Shona, are spoken by some 240 million people across about 9 million square kilometers. The authors describe an expansion driven by farming. Farming fed more people than foraging, so populations grew, and growing populations moved into new land.

Genetics tells the same story of depth. Tishkoff's team found that African populations, together with African Americans, showed the highest levels of genetic diversity within populations of any groups in their study. They identified fourteen ancestral clusters inside Africa that line up with language and self-described ethnicity. Africa is the source of all modern humans, and its peoples have been branching and mixing for longer than anyone else.

This diversity matters for the rest of the course because it crossed the ocean. A ship leaving the Bight of Biafra might carry Igbo speakers. A ship from West Central Africa might carry speakers of Kikongo or Kimbundu. Some captives from the Senegal River region were Muslim scholars. One of them, Omar ibn Said, from Futa Toro in West Africa, was enslaved in North Carolina after 1807 and in 1831 wrote his life story in Arabic. His manuscript is now in the Library of Congress. Enslavers lumped all these people together. The people themselves did not begin as one people, and Lesson 9 traces how they made themselves into one.

Key idea: Africa holds more than 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups in four large language families, and the Bantu expansion explains why one branch spans most of central, eastern and southern Africa.

Common misconceptions

• Africa is basically one place with one culture. It holds more than 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups, four large language families and 55 African Union member states.
• Africa is mostly jungle. Savanna covers almost half the continent and the Sahara about a quarter. Rainforest covers much less.
• Most enslaved Africans were taken to the United States. Mainland North America received 388,744 of about 10.7 million survivors, about 3.6 percent. Brazil received about 45 percent.
• African American history begins in 1619. It begins with the African societies people came from, and Africans were in the Americas from the early 1500s, as Lesson 5 shows.
• African American studies began in the 1960s. The university departments did. The scholarship is older, as Schomburg's collecting shows.

Where this leaves us

• Schomburg argued in 1925 that the Black past had to be recovered from evidence, and his collection became the Schomburg Center.
• His three conclusions become three habits: look for agency, look at the group behind the famous individual, and look back before slavery.
• African American studies is interdisciplinary. The AP course has four units, four themes and three skills.
• About 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard ships and about 10.7 million survived the crossing; mainland North America received about 3.6 percent of them.
• Africa is a continent of zones: savanna on almost half, the Sahara on a quarter, the Sahel between them.
• More than 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups fall into four large language families, and the Bantu expansion spread more than 500 related languages from near the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

Sources

1. College Board. (2024). AP African American Studies course and exam description: Course at a glance (Course Framework V.1). apcentral.collegeboard.org
2. College Board. (2026). AP African American Studies course overview (APD-959). apcentral.collegeboard.org
3. Schomburg, A. A. (1925). The Negro digs up his past. In A. Locke (Ed.), The New Negro: An interpretation (pp. 231-237). Albert and Charles Boni. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. Carnegie Corporation of New York. (n.d.). Harlem's Schomburg Center: Celebrating the history and culture of the Black experience. carnegie.org
5. San Francisco State University. (n.d.). Nathan Hare: Director of Black Studies. DIVA digital archive. diva.sfsu.edu
6. SlaveVoyages Consortium. (n.d.). Estimates: Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1501-1866 [Database; tables of embarked and disembarked captives, consulted October 2026]. slavevoyages.org
7. National Geographic Society. (n.d.). Africa: Physical geography. National Geographic Education. education.nationalgeographic.org
8. Koile, E., Greenhill, S. J., Blasi, D. E., Bouckaert, R., and Gray, R. D. (2022). Phylogeographic analysis of the Bantu language expansion supports a rainforest route. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(32), e2112853119. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
9. Tishkoff, S. A., et al. (2009). The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans. Science, 324(5930), 1035-1044. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
10. Deeb, M.-J. (2019, January 17). New online: Rare autobiography in Arabic by enslaved American. Library of Congress, 4 Corners of the World blog. blogs.loc.gov

Gold in Cairo, 1324

In 1324, Mansa Musa, ruler of the West African empire of Mali, stopped in Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca. About a dozen years later a historian from Damascus, Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, wrote down what was still remembered of the visit. His account begins: "This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions." Musa's party gave and spent so much gold, al-Umari reported, that gold lost value in Egypt. Before the visit, a mithqal of gold, the standard weight, had sold for at least 25 silver dirhams. Afterward it fetched 22 or less, and it had stayed that low for about twelve years.

Two questions follow from that story, and this lesson answers them by comparison. First, where did a West African king get so much gold, and what kind of state could carry it across the Sahara? Second, was Mali a marvel with no history behind it, or the latest in a long line of African states? The answer to the second question starts two thousand years before Musa, on the Nile.

Kush: pharaohs from the south

South of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now Sudan, lay Nubia, home of the kingdom of Kush. Its Napatan period, named for the city of Napata, ran from about 1000 to 250 BCE. Around 760 BCE King Kashta united all of Nubia. His successor Piye invaded Upper Egypt. Piye's successor Shabaqo became the first true pharaoh of Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty, ruling all of Egypt and Nubia, the largest unified state of its time. Kushite pharaohs held Egypt until the Assyrians conquered it and drove the last great one, Taharqo, back to Napata. Historians date the dynasty to about 712-664 BCE.

Kush borrowed from Egypt without becoming Egypt. Its kings made the Egyptian god Amun their chief deity and were buried beneath steep-sided pyramids near Napata. Yet, as the Metropolitan Museum's chronology points out, its builders and artists adapted Egyptian forms for their own purposes and gave their work a strong style of its own.

Around 250 BCE the royal cemetery moved south to Meroë. The city stood where caravan roads met trade along the White and Blue Niles, which made it East Africa's most important trading center. Its workshops turned out iron and bronze objects, fine gold jewelry, decorated pottery and textiles. The Meroitic kingdom lasted until about 350 CE.

The point: Kush, an African kingdom south of Egypt, ruled Egypt itself for about half a century and later built a great trading capital at Meroë.

Nok and Jenne-jeno: sculptors and townspeople of West Africa

West Africa built its own early societies, with no pharaohs to borrow from. In central Nigeria, in the region between the modern cities of Abuja, Jos and Kaduna, archaeologists led by Peter Breunig of Goethe University Frankfurt have studied the Nok culture. They date its beginnings to about 1500 BCE and its terracotta sculptures to at least the ninth century BCE. The sculptures are large, carefully made clay figures and heads, one of them close to life size, in a style that stayed consistent for more than five hundred years. Ironworking appeared a few centuries after the first sculptures. The culture's traces fade in the last centuries BCE.

Farther west, on the inland delta of the Niger River in today's Mali, people settled at Jenne-jeno by about 250 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum calls it the oldest known city in sub-Saharan Africa. It seems to have worked iron from its first settlement. By 850 CE it was a major urban center, growing with trade and with the specialization of labor, and it was only one of at least twelve sites of similar size in the middle Niger region.

The point: Nok's sculptors and ironworkers and Jenne-jeno's townspeople show that complex societies arose in West Africa independently, centuries before any outside empire reached the region.

Aksum: a Red Sea power

In the highlands of northern Ethiopia stands a field of carved granite stelae, tall stone monuments raised over royal tombs. The tallest still standing rises more than 23 meters and is carved to look like a nine-story building. The largest of all, about 33 meters long, lies where it fell, perhaps while it was being raised. UNESCO calls it possibly the largest single stone that ancient people ever tried to stand upright.

The kingdom that raised the stelae, Aksum, lasted from the 1st to the 8th century CE. UNESCO ranks it as the most powerful state of its time between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. It controlled the ivory trade with Sudan, and its fleets dominated Red Sea trade through the port of Adulis. In the 4th century King Ezana left inscriptions in three languages: Greek, Sabaean and Ge'ez, the classical Ethiopian language. Christianity came to Aksum in that same century, more than a thousand years before the Atlantic slave trade began. Ge'ez is still used in the worship of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Aksum's monuments also have a modern history. During Italy's occupation of Ethiopia, one obelisk was carried to Rome as a war trophy. It was returned in 2005 and raised again at Aksum in 2008. Lesson 32 takes up similar arguments over who should keep the monuments of the past.

The point: Aksum was a Christian, literate trading power on the Red Sea, linking Africa, Arabia and the Mediterranean world.

Ghana: between the gold and the salt

Arab travelers, geographers and historians called the broad savanna south of the Sahara bilad al-sudan, "land of the Blacks." That is why historians call its states the Sudanic empires and the region the western Sudan. It has nothing to do with the modern country of Sudan, far to the east.

The first great Sudanic state was ancient Ghana, built by Soninke-speaking people from roughly the 300s to the 500s CE onward. Ancient Ghana lay in today's Mauritania and Mali, well north of the modern country that later borrowed its name. Its wealth came from position. Gold was mined to the south, around the upper Senegal River and beyond. Salt came from desert mines such as Taghaza. People south of the Sahara needed salt in their diet and to preserve food, and traders bound for North Africa and Europe wanted gold. Ghana sat between the two and taxed what passed through.

Camel caravans had begun crossing the Sahara by the 3rd or 4th century CE. From the 7th century, Arab and Berber merchants expanded the trade, and Islam traveled with them. In the 11th century, Abu Ubayd al-Bakri, a nobleman in Muslim Spain, compiled a description of Ghana from the reports of Muslim traders. He described the center at Kumbi Saleh as two separate towns, one of them distinctly Muslim and full of mosques. Arab writers called Ghana a land of gold. From the 1050s, raids by the Almoravids, a militant movement of Muslim Berbers, drained Ghana's strength. By the early 1200s the Soso kingdom had absorbed much of its territory.

The point: Ghana grew rich by standing between the gold of the south and the salt of the Sahara and taxing the trade that crossed its lands.

Mali: Sundiata and Mansa Musa

Mali's founding is remembered in two ways at once, by written history and by living oral tradition. Around 1230 to 1235, a Mandinka prince named Sundiata Keita, "the hungering lion," defeated the Soso king Sumanguru Kante. Sundiata's victory marks the birth of the Mali empire, and Mande griots, the hereditary oral historians of the region, still perform his story today. Lesson 3 looks closely at how they keep it.

Mansa Musa came to power in 1312 and led Mali through its most prosperous years. While he was away on his pilgrimage, his forces took the trading city of Gao. Timbuktu's Djinguere Ber mosque is the one most often linked to his name. Europe heard of him too. On the Catalan Atlas, a map made on the island of Majorca around 1375 and possibly drawn by the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques, Musa sits on a throne holding a golden orb. Its caption names him lord of Guinea and calls him the richest and most distinguished ruler of the whole region, because of the great quantity of gold found in his lands.

The best eyewitness account of Mali comes from Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan judge trained in Islamic law who traveled across much of the known world. He reached the capital of Mali on 28 June 1352 and left on 27 February 1353. He reported, among much else, how salt rose in price as it moved south from the desert. This passage, and the next, are from H. A. R. Gibb's 1929 translation, which uses "negroes" for the people of Mali:

At Iwalatan a load of salt brings eight to ten mithqals; in the town of Malli it sells for twenty to thirty, and sometimes as much as forty. The negroes use salt as a medium of exchange, just as gold and silver is used [elsewhere]; they cut it up into pieces and buy and sell with it.

Later he summed up what he admired:

The negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust, and have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people. Their sultan shows no mercy to anyone who is guilty of the least act of it. There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.

Ibn Battuta was not a flatterer. He praised Mali's mosques, crowded on Fridays, and the zeal with which children learned the Quran by heart. He then listed "bad qualities," mostly customs of dress, diet and court ceremony that offended a strict Moroccan jurist. Read as a source, that mixture is useful. His praise of Mali's order and safety is more believable because he was ready to criticize what he disliked.

The point: Mali's power rested on the gold and salt trade and on Islam-shaped government, and we know it through griots' tradition, Arabic writers such as al-Umari and Ibn Battuta, and European maps.

Songhai: Sonni Ali, Askia Muhammad and the guns of 1591

The Songhai people built their state along the middle Niger, first around Kukiya and then at Gao, a trading city whose people had become Muslims in the 11th century. As Mali weakened in the 1400s through disputes and power struggles, Songhai pulled free. Under Sonni Ali, who ruled from 1464 to 1492, it became an empire. He captured Timbuktu in 1468, defeated the Mossi to the south and the Tuareg to the north, and took control of the trans-Saharan routes and the region's salt and copper mines.

Askia Muhammad, who ruled from 1493 to 1528, expanded the empire further and made Timbuktu famous as a center of Islamic faith and scholarship. Songhai's end came suddenly. In 1591 the sultan of Morocco sent an army equipped with firearms across the desert to seize the salt mines and trade routes. Songhai's soldiers fought with handheld weapons and were defeated, and Songhai's domination of the region ended.

The point: Songhai inherited and expanded Mali's trading world until Moroccan firearms broke it in 1591.

Six societies side by side

The table puts the six societies of this lesson next to each other. Read across a row to describe one society. Read down a column to compare them.

Reading the table

Read down the "Source of wealth" column first. Every society on it sat where routes met. Meroë stood at the junction of caravan roads and two Niles. Aksum held a Red Sea port. Ghana, Mali and Songhai stood between the gold fields and the salt mines. Jenne-jeno grew on a river. Mansa Musa's gold in Cairo was not luck. It was the product of a trading system that West African states had controlled and taxed for close to a thousand years.

Next read the "Religion and writing" column. Each society took in outside religions on its own terms. Kush adopted Amun but built its own style. Aksum became Christian in the 4th century. In the western Sudan, Islam arrived with merchants and, in the Met's description, advanced gradually and by negotiation, with rulers converting while older court customs continued. Ibn Battuta saw both at once in 1352: crowded Friday mosques, and court ceremonies he found strange.

Finally read "How we know." The evidence is uneven. For Nok and Jenne-jeno there is archaeology but no writing. For Ghana and Mali historians lean on Arabic-language writers, some of whom never visited, together with oral tradition. The Metropolitan Museum's own essay admits that knowledge of these empires depends on, and is limited by, those early written sources, and that the period before contact with Islam is still largely unknown. A good historian says what the evidence supports and stops there.

Common misconceptions

• Africa had no cities or states before Europeans arrived. Jenne-jeno was a town by about 250 BCE, Kushite kings ruled Egypt in the 700s and 600s BCE, and Aksum traded with Rome and Persia.
• Mansa Musa's wealth was a one-man fluke. It came from centuries of control and taxation of the gold and salt trade, first by Ghana, then by Mali.
• Islam was imposed on West Africa by conquest. It arrived mainly with merchants and spread gradually, with rulers converting and older customs continuing. Military raids such as the Almoravids' were part of the story, not the whole of it.
• Egypt was the only great ancient civilization in Africa. Kush ruled Egypt for a time, and Aksum was among the great powers of its age.
• Ancient Ghana stood where modern Ghana is. Ancient Ghana lay in today's Mauritania and Mali. The modern country on the Gulf of Guinea borrowed the old empire's name.

Putting it together

• Kush, on the Nile, ruled Egypt as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty and later built a trading capital at Meroë.
• Nok sculpture and ironworking and the town of Jenne-jeno show independent West African complexity long before outside empires arrived.
• Aksum was a Christian Red Sea power with its own script, Ge'ez, and its own monumental stelae.
• Ghana, Mali and Songhai grew rich by controlling and taxing the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt.
• Mansa Musa's 1324 visit to Cairo, recorded by al-Umari, and Ibn Battuta's stay of 1352-53 are key written sources for Mali, and both must be read for their authors' points of view.
• Morocco's army, armed with firearms, ended Songhai's domination in 1591.

Sources

1. Al-Umari, Ibn Fadl Allah. (ca. 1337-1338). Account of Mansa Musa's visit to Cairo. In N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (Eds.), Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history (pp. 269-273). Cambridge University Press, 1981. Excerpt in World History Commons. worldhistorycommons.org
2. Ibn Battuta. (1929). Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (H. A. R. Gibb, Trans.; Mali section, pp. 317-335). George Routledge and Sons. Internet Archive. archive.org
3. Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. (2000). The empires of the western Sudan. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Sudan, 1000 B.C.-1 A.D.; Western Sudan, 500-1000 A.D.; Western and Central Sudan, 1000-1400 A.D.; Western and Central Sudan, 1400-1600 A.D. [Chronologies]. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Aksum. whc.unesco.org
6. Block Museum of Art. (2019). Atlas of maritime charts (The Catalan Atlas), 1375 [Object record, Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time]. Northwestern University. caravans.library.northwestern.edu
7. Scientia. (2022, May 20). Professor Peter Breunig: The significance of Nok culture sculptures in Nigerian prehistory. scientia.global
8. Breunig, P., and Rupp, N. (2016). An outline of recent studies on the Nigerian Nok culture. Journal of African Archaeology, 14(3), 237-255.

A scholar asks for his books, 1607

In 1607, after twelve years of forced exile in Marrakesh, a scholar from Timbuktu named Ahmad Baba was finally allowed to go home. Before he left, he asked the Moroccan authorities for the books they had taken from him. He wanted, the story goes, all 1,600 of them. Ahmad Baba had been born in 1556 into a family of scholars of Berber descent. After Morocco's army destroyed Songhai's power in 1591, Timbuktu's new rulers accused him of disloyalty and deported him north to Marrakesh.

Notice what kind of wealth Ahmad Baba asked for. Not gold, but a library. This lesson follows several people like him: a scholar, a family of griots, a prophet, a queen mother and a warrior queen. Each one shows a way that West and Central Africans kept knowledge, made sense of the sacred, and held power, long before and during the first years of the Atlantic trade.

Start with the number, because a good historian always does. Shamil Jeppie, a historian at the University of Cape Town who has spent years on Timbuktu's manuscripts, admires the story but asks whether the figure is suspiciously precise. It reached us through later writers, and he wonders whether they got it right. The doubt does not make the library imaginary. It reminds you to ask how every number in this course reached the page.

Timbuktu's manuscripts

Timbuktu grew up around 1100 near the Niger River, and under Songhai's ruler Askia Muhammad it became famous for Islamic faith and scholarship. Its mosques, among them Sankore, Djinguere Ber and Sidi Yahia, were places of worship and of teaching. Families of scholars copied, bought and inherited books: Islamic religious texts, and also secular works on astronomy, medicine and diplomacy, some of them dating to the 13th century. Most were written in Arabic. Others are in West African languages such as Bambara and Fulfulde, usually written in Arabic script.

The collections survived into our own century, and then nearly did not. In April 2012 armed rebels seized Timbuktu and held it for ten months. Abdel Kader Haidara, keeper of his own family library and founder of the organization SAVAMA-DCI, secretly moved most of the city's manuscripts south to Bamako, Mali's capital, to keep them safe. From December 2013 the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, known as HMML, worked with SAVAMA-DCI to photograph the evacuated collections. HMML reports that the work is now complete: about 308,000 manuscripts, recorded in some 4.35 million images that scholars anywhere can study.

Remember: Timbuktu was a city of libraries. Its manuscripts, in Arabic and in West African languages written in Arabic script, are now one of the largest written records of Africa's past.

A scholar's argument about race

Ahmad Baba's writing matters to this course for a second reason. Around 1615 he answered questions from scholars about which Africans could lawfully be enslaved. His treatise is known as Mi'raj al-Su'ud. The historian Timothy Cleaveland, in a 2015 study, explains that Ahmad Baba rejected the idea that being Black made a person a slave. He criticized a racialized reading of the biblical "curse of Ham," a story later used again and again to defend slavery in the Americas. Under the Islamic law he applied, a free Muslim could not be enslaved, whatever his color, and that ruled out much of the trans-Saharan slave trade.

Cleaveland is careful not to turn Ahmad Baba into an abolitionist. The same treatise classed many West African peoples as non-Muslim or only lightly Muslim, and so left them open to enslavement. Its limits came from religion, not from opposition to slavery itself. Cleaveland also notes that Ahmad Baba, a Berber scholar living in the Sahel, included only one Black scholar in his own biographical dictionary of jurists. Hold both truths. A Timbuktu scholar argued against linking blackness to slavery more than two centuries before American abolitionists, and his argument still protected some people and not others.

Remember: Ahmad Baba rejected skin color as a reason to enslave, but his argument rested on religion and still allowed the enslavement of people he counted as non-Muslim.

Libraries that sing: griots and the Sunjata epic

Writing was one way to keep knowledge. In the Mande world of Mali, the more widespread way was the voice. Griots, called jeli in Mande languages, are hereditary families of historians, genealogists, musicians and advisers. They memorize and perform the history of lineages and kingdoms, above all the epic of Sunjata Keita, founder of Mali. A well-known prose version, published by the historian Djibril Tamsir Niane in 1960, was taken down from the griot Mamadou Kouyaté.

An instrument shows how seriously this knowledge is guarded. In the village of Nyagassola in northern Guinea, the Kouyaté griots of the Dokala family keep the Sosso-Bala, a balafon, or wooden xylophone, about 1.5 meters long, with 20 slats and gourds fixed beneath them. Tradition holds that it belonged to Sumaoro Kante, the Soso king whom Sunjata defeated. Only the family's patriarch, the Balatigui, may play it, on occasions such as the Muslim New Year and funerals, and he teaches the balafon to children from the age of seven. UNESCO recognized the Sosso-Bala and the space around it as part of humanity's intangible heritage in 2001.

Oral tradition is a real archive, but like any archive it has to be read critically. UNESCO also honors the Manden Charter, which it describes as proclaimed at Kurukan Fuga in the early thirteenth century and counts among the world's oldest constitutions, though one kept mainly in oral form. It promotes peace among diverse peoples, the inviolability of the human being and an end to enslavement by raiding. Yet the written text most people read was gathered at a workshop of traditional and modern communicators in Kankan, Guinea, in March 1998. Siriman Kouyaté, a magistrate from the family that guards the Sosso-Bala, structured it with reference to modern legal texts. Historians therefore debate which parts are medieval and which are modern.

Remember: Griots are trained keepers of history, and their traditions preserve real knowledge across centuries. They also change as they are passed on, so you ask of them the same questions you ask of a manuscript.

Gods, ancestors and the meeting of religions

Religion in West and Central Africa was not one system. Among the Yoruba of what is now southwestern Nigeria, the Ifa system of divination guides important individual and community decisions. A priest called a babalawo casts sacred palm nuts or a divination chain to identify one of 256 odu, or chapters, each with hundreds of chanted verses called ese. The verses, UNESCO notes, carry Yoruba history, language, beliefs and views of the world. Ifa honors Orunmila, the deity of wisdom, and it is still practiced by Yoruba communities and by the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.

In the kingdom of Kongo, on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, daily life was understood to be shaped by hidden forces, among them the ancestors, who lived in an other world reached only through rituals led by initiated specialists. Power could be gathered into minkisi, made objects believed to hold and release spiritual force. Islam, meanwhile, had spread across the western Sudan with merchants, as Lesson 2 showed, and rulers often embraced it while older ceremonies continued at court.

When two religions meet and blend, scholars call the result syncretism. Kongo shows the process clearly. Portuguese ships brought Christianity to the Congo River in the 1480s, and in 1491 the Kongo ruler Nzinga Nkuwu accepted baptism as João. According to the historian Carlos Almeida, Kongo's elites quickly took up Christian symbols "as a new language of political legitimacy." Baptism spread widely in the villages, while Christian marriage took hold mainly among nobles. Kongo artists carved crucifixes and figures of Saint Anthony in their own style. The art historian Cecile Fromont argues that the cross in Kongo worked as a meeting point, where local and foreign symbols combined into new meanings.

Kongo Christianity even produced its own prophet. In 1704 a young noblewoman named Kimpa Vita, baptized Dona Beatriz, said Saint Anthony had charged her with restoring Kongo's unity, torn apart by civil war and slave raiding. She preached that Jesus was African and had been born in Mbanza Kongo, the capital. She was tried for heresy and executed in 1706 on the orders of the Kongo ruler Pedro IV, with the help of Capuchin missionaries. Almeida notes that roughly 40 percent of the Africans carried to the Americas came from this broader region. Many of them arrived already Christian, in a Kongo way.

Remember: African religions were systems of thought with their own scholars, texts and rituals, and when Islam and Christianity arrived, Africans reshaped them as much as they were reshaped by them.

Kin, lineage and power

In most of these societies, a person's place came from kinship. A lineage is a group descended from a common ancestor; a clan is a wider group of lineages claiming a shared origin. Some peoples traced descent through the father's line, which is called patrilineal. Others, including the Akan peoples of what is now Ghana, traced it through the mother's line, which is called matrilineal. Lineage decided who inherited land, offices and titles, so kinship and politics were one subject, not two.

That gave women real political power. The Detroit Institute of Arts, describing a nineteenth-century Asante sculpture of a queen mother, notes that among the matrilineal Akan the queen mother's stool ranks above the king's, because the queen mother alone had the authority to select a new king.

In the kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, the king Esigie won a civil war against his brother and defeated the invading Igala in the early 1500s. His mother, Idia, received much of the credit for her political counsel, her medicinal knowledge and the spiritual power attributed to her. Esigie created a new office for her: iyoba, or queen mother, with a political rank equal to a senior chief and a separate residence with its own staff. An ivory pendant mask in the Metropolitan Museum, believed to portray Idia, was worn by Benin's kings in ceremonies meant to drive away harmful spiritual forces.

Njinga, queen of Ndongo in what is now Angola, faced a harder world. She inherited rule in 1624, when Ndongo was under attack from Portuguese forces based at Luanda and from African rivals, all in search of captives for the slave trade. Njinga was baptized as Ana and allied with Portugal, but by 1626 the Portuguese had turned on her. She then built a new state at Matamba. There she offered sanctuary to people who had escaped slavery and to Portuguese-trained African soldiers, organized fighters in militia camps called kilombo, and allied with the Dutch when they seized Luanda in 1641. When she died in 1663, Matamba dealt with the Portuguese as an equal.

Her story is not a simple tale of resistance, and you should not tell it as one. To survive, Njinga worked to make her state a middleman in the slave trade rather than a source of captives. Like many African rulers of her century, she resisted European power and took part in the trade at the same time. The art historian Alexander Bortolot adds a caution about evidence. We know women such as Idia, Njinga and Kimpa Vita largely through oral histories, artworks and European documents of their time. Before contact with Europe, written records of women's names and deeds mostly do not exist.

Remember: Kinship organized inheritance and office, and through it women such as Akan queen mothers, Idia and Njinga held power that European observers often failed to understand.

Common misconceptions

• Africa had no written learning before Europeans arrived. Timbuktu's scholars wrote and collected manuscripts for centuries; HMML has digitized about 308,000 of them.
• Oral tradition is just legend. Griot families are trained historians who keep genealogies and epics across generations. Their accounts also change over time, so they are tested like any other source.
• Christianity reached Africa only with colonial rule. Aksum was Christian in the 4th century, and Kongo's rulers chose baptism in 1491 and reshaped the faith in their own terms.
• Women held no power in African states. Akan queen mothers selected kings, Benin's iyoba ranked with senior chiefs, and Njinga ruled two kingdoms in succession.
• Every African ruler of the slave-trade era was either a victim or a collaborator. Many, like Njinga, resisted European domination and took part in the trade at the same time.

What to remember

• Ahmad Baba's lost library and Timbuktu's surviving manuscripts show a deep tradition of written scholarship in Arabic and in African languages.
• His treatise rejected blackness as a reason for enslavement but still allowed the enslavement of people classed as non-Muslim.
• Griots keep history in performance, as the Sosso-Bala and the Sunjata epic show; the 1998 text of the Manden Charter shows why oral sources are read critically.
• Ifa divination, Kongo ideas of ancestors and minkisi, and West African Islam were full religious systems; Kongo Christianity became a syncretic faith with its own prophet, Kimpa Vita.
• Kinship and lineage organized power, and women such as Akan queen mothers, Idia and Njinga exercised it.

Sources

1. Jeppie, S. (2021, March 2). Writing Timbuktu [Colloquium text]. Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. wiko-berlin.de
2. Cleaveland, T. (2015). Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti and his Islamic critique of racial slavery in the Maghrib. The Journal of North African Studies, 20(1), 42-64. Record in the African Union Common Repository. library.au.int
3. Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. (n.d.). HMML global operations: Mali. hmml.org
4. Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. (n.d.). HMML digitizes Timbuktu's historic manuscript collections. hmml.org
5. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. (n.d.). Cultural space of Sosso-Bala; Manden Charter, proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga; Ifa divination system. ich.unesco.org
6. Kouyate, S. (2009). The charter of Kurukan Fuga. West Africa Review, 15. africaknowledgeproject.org
7. Almeida, C. (2026, June 30). Christianity and Kongo visual culture. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
8. Bortolot, A. I. (2003). Women leaders in African history: Idia, first queen mother of Benin and Women leaders in African history: Ana Nzinga, queen of Ndongo. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
9. Detroit Institute of Arts. (n.d.). Maternity figure (obaa hemaa) [Asante, 19th century; object 2017.18]. dia.org
10. Niane, D. T. (1965). Sundiata: An epic of old Mali (G. D. Pickett, Trans.). Longman. (Original work published 1960)

A wrong answer, 1871

On 5 September 1871, local Karanga men led a young German explorer named Carl Mauch to a city of stone in what is now southern Zimbabwe. Granite walls, laid without mortar, curved across a hillside and a valley, in places taller than a three-story house. Mauch had come looking for Ophir, the land in the Bible that sent gold to King Solomon. He decided he had found it. The great enclosure, he concluded, must have been built by the Queen of Sheba.

That answer was wrong, and it was more than a scholar's mistake. For almost a century, the claim that outsiders built Great Zimbabwe was used to argue that Africans had never built anything great. This lesson starts from the wrong answer and works through it step by step, the way you would debug a faulty proof, to find exactly where the reasoning broke. Then it follows the trade that actually built the city, out to the Swahili coast, and the diplomacy of the Kingdom of Kongo, out to Lisbon and Rome.

Step one: the conclusion came first

The first fault is in the starting point. Before Mauch ever saw the ruins, a German trader in the region told him they could never have been built by Black Africans. Mauch arrived believing it. According to Peter Tyson's account for PBS's NOVA, Mauch took the soapstone and iron objects he found as signs that a civilized nation, by which he meant a white one, had once lived there. Then he cut a splinter from a wooden lintel. It was reddish and fragrant, rather like the wood of his pencil. So, he reasoned, it was cedar from Lebanon, so Phoenicians had brought it, so the Queen of Sheba had built the walls.

Look at the chain. Each link depends on the one before, and the first link is an assumption, not evidence. The last link is not even true: the wood was African sandalwood, a local hardwood that later visitors also found in the walls. When an argument begins with its conclusion, evidence gets bent to fit it.

What matters here: Mauch's theory rested on a prejudice he brought with him and on a chain of guesses, the first of which was never tested.

Step two: evidence that pointed the other way

In 1890 Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company occupied the region. The company wanted the ruins to prove an ancient non-African presence, and it hired a traveler and antiquarian, J. Theodore Bent, to excavate in 1891. Bent's own finds pointed straight at local builders: pottery, spindle whorls for spinning thread, iron spearheads, axes and hoes, and crucibles for working gold, all much like objects still used by the Karanga around him. His 1892 book reached a different verdict anyway:

The balance of probabilities seems to be in favour of that country being South Arabia ... When the original builders of Zimbabwe have been traced to their home, it will remain to discover who were their successors in Mashonaland that rebuilt the western wall of the great temple and some portions of other buildings, for this certainly was not done by any of the present negro races.

Here is the second fault: a conclusion that contradicts the evidence the author himself dug up. The third fault followed. The company later made a local journalist, Richard Nicklin Hall, curator of the site. In searching for signs of foreign builders, he stripped away between three and twelve feet of layered deposits across the ruins. Those layers were exactly the evidence that could have dated the site, and once dug out without records they were gone for good.

What matters here: Bent's evidence was African while his conclusion was not, and Hall's digging destroyed much of the evidence that could have settled the question.

Step three: a method that worked

In 1905 the archaeologist David Randall-MacIver, a protege of the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, went to the Rhodesian ruins to answer the question with method rather than wishes. He dated the sites by the imported objects found in their layers, such as beads and pottery whose age was known from elsewhere, and he looked closely at the remains of houses inside the walls. His report of 1906 was blunt:

These dwellings, then, found everywhere within the stone enclosures, and inseparable from them, are unquestionably African in every detail, and belong to a period which is fixed by foreign imports as in general medieval. There is one last refuge for those who cannot deny the African origin of the Rhodesian ruins and yet refuse to believe that negroes can have built them. The negroes built them, these theorists suggest, but under the dominance of a foreign race. To this the answer is easy. The onus probandi lies with those who advance a view for which there is not a particle of evidence.

Onus probandi is Latin for the burden of proof. Randall-MacIver's point is the key to the whole debug. The person making a claim has to supply evidence for it. Outsider theories never had any, so they did not deserve to be treated as one side of a fair argument.

The prejudice outlived the proof. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Great Zimbabwe became a symbol for African nationalists, the white-minority government of Rhodesia suppressed archaeologists' findings that Africans had built it. The archaeologist Peter Garlake, author of a standard study of the site, was forced out of the country. When the country won majority rule in 1980, it took the name Zimbabwe, and it adopted as its emblem the soapstone bird found at the ruins.

What matters here: Careful dating and the burden of proof settled the question in 1906, but politics kept the wrong answer alive for decades.

What Great Zimbabwe actually was

UNESCO, which lists the ruins as a World Heritage site, gives the current picture. Great Zimbabwe was built between about 1100 and 1450 CE by a Bantu-speaking Iron Age people, the ancestors of the Shona. It had three main parts: the Hill Complex, a royal center on a granite hilltop; the Great Enclosure, an ellipse of cut granite blocks laid in regular courses around a solid conical tower, built in the 14th century; and the valley settlements below. In the 14th century it was the leading city of a state that stretched across a gold-rich plateau, with more than 10,000 inhabitants. The name Zimbabwe is often explained as the Shona phrase for houses of stone, though Garlake preferred a reading meaning venerated houses, the homes or graves of chiefs.

Archaeologists have found glass beads, Chinese porcelain, Persian pottery, and gold and Arab coins from the coastal city of Kilwa. Those finds show the city's wealth came from trade, above all trade in gold sent to the coast. Around 1450 Great Zimbabwe was abandoned, apparently because the land around it could no longer feed so many people and its forests had been cut. Power shifted to other centers such as Khami.

What matters here: Great Zimbabwe was a Shona city of more than 10,000 people, built between about 1100 and 1450 and enriched by gold traded to the Indian Ocean coast.

Kilwa and the Swahili coast

Follow the gold east and you reach the Swahili coast, a chain of Muslim trading towns along the shore of East Africa whose people spoke Swahili, one of the Bantu languages met in Lesson 1. On a small island off southern Tanzania stood Kilwa Kisiwani. UNESCO reports that Kilwa was occupied from the 9th to the 19th century and reached its height in the 13th and 14th. Its merchants traded gold and ivory from the interior for silver, carnelian stones, perfumes, Persian glazed pottery and Chinese porcelain. Kilwa minted its own coins from the 11th to the 14th century. Its Great Mosque, built of coral stone and lime mortar and roofed with domes and vaults, is the oldest standing mosque on the East African coast. Its sultans built the palace of Husuni Kubwa, between about 1310 and 1333, with a large octagonal bathing pool.

Ibn Battuta, whom you met in Mali in Lesson 2, sailed down this coast in 1331, two decades before his journey across the Sahara. In Gibb's 1929 translation he calls the town Kulwa:

I was told by a merchant that the town of Sufala lies a fortnight's journey [south] from Kulwa, and that gold dust is brought to Sufala from Yufi in the country of the Limis, which is a month's journey distant from it. Kulwa is a very fine and substantially built town ...

Sufala is Sofala, the port on the coast of what is now Mozambique, and the gold came from the interior plateau where Great Zimbabwe stood. The same trade that filled Kilwa's markets put Kilwa's coins in the ground at Great Zimbabwe. When Portuguese ships arrived in the Indian Ocean, they built a fort at Kilwa in the 16th century, and the city's long decline began.

What matters here: Kilwa linked the gold of the African interior to Arabia, Persia, India and China, and it was rich, literate and Muslim long before Europeans arrived.

Kongo: a kingdom that wrote back

On the Atlantic side of the continent, the Kingdom of Kongo was, in UNESCO's account, one of the largest states in southern Africa from the 14th to the 19th century. Its capital, Mbanza Kongo, stood on a plateau about 570 meters above sea level, around the royal residence, the court and the royal burial grounds. Portuguese ships reached the Congo River in the 1480s, and in 1491 the ruler Nzinga Nkuwu was baptized, as Lesson 3 described. About a decade later his son Mvemba Nzinga, baptized Afonso, won the throne. He spread Christian rituals and sent young nobles to be educated, some of them in Portugal, in the faith and in written Portuguese.

Afonso used that literacy as a weapon. In 1526 he wrote to King Joao III of Portugal that Portuguese merchants were seizing his people every day, including free people, nobles, the sons of nobles and members of his own family, and selling them as slaves. In one English translation, he declared his will that in his kingdoms "there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them." His protest was aimed above all at the kidnapping of free people and nobles. It did not stop the trade. UNESCO notes that Kongo stood at the center of the most important route for the trade in enslaved people, and SlaveVoyages estimates that about 5.7 million captives were embarked from West Central Africa over the whole Atlantic trade, more than from any other region.

Kongo also practiced diplomacy far from home. According to UNESCO, in 1608 the Pope accredited in Rome the first ambassador of a sub-Saharan African state to the Vatican, Kongo's envoy. African rulers, in other words, were writing letters to European kings and sending ambassadors to the Pope at the very moment the Atlantic trade was growing.

What matters here: Kongo's kings dealt with Portugal and Rome as fellow Christian rulers, and Afonso's letters are among the earliest African written protests against the Atlantic slave trade.

Africans in Europe before 1700

The African diaspora did not begin in the Americas. By the 1500s, enslaved and free Africans lived and worked in Portugal, Spain and Italy. Two lives show the range of what was possible, and what was not.

Juan Latino was born around 1517, most likely in southern Spain, to parents from West Africa, and grew up enslaved in the household of the Duke of Sessa. The duke paid for his studies at the University of Granada, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1546 and later taught. He married a noblewoman, Ana de Carleval. In 1573 a Granada printer published his first book of Latin poetry, including an epic in honor of Don John of Austria and the Christian victory at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Juan Latino died around 1594, a famous scholar and poet. The scholar Elizabeth Wright has studied how he wrote about his own African heritage in Europe's international language of learning.

Juan de Pareja, born around 1608 in Antequera, Spain, was enslaved for more than two decades in the studio of the painter Diego Velazquez. In Rome in 1650 Velazquez painted his portrait, now in the Metropolitan Museum, and that same year a document was drawn up freeing Pareja upon their return to Madrid. Pareja went on to work as a painter in his own right, producing large religious works such as The Calling of Saint Matthew of 1661. In 1926 Arturo Schomburg, the collector from Lesson 1, traveled to Spain to research Black life in Europe, Pareja's included. A 2023 exhibition at the Met finally told Pareja's story in full.

What matters here: Africans and people of African descent were part of early modern Europe as scholars, artists, servants and diplomats, and their lives show both what slavery took and what individuals made of themselves within it.

Common misconceptions

• Great Zimbabwe was built by Arabs, Phoenicians or other outsiders. Every scientific study since 1905 has found it African. UNESCO credits the ancestors of the Shona, between about 1100 and 1450.
• The outsider theories were an honest scientific debate. They began from prejudice, ignored the excavators' own finds, and never produced evidence. The burden of proof was never met.
• East Africa had no links to the wider world before the Portuguese. Kilwa traded with Arabia, Persia, India and China for centuries, and minted its own coins.
• African rulers never objected to the slave trade. Afonso I of Kongo protested in writing in 1526 against the seizure of his free subjects, though he could not stop the trade.
• There were no Black people in Europe before modern times. Juan Latino taught at Granada in the 1500s and Juan de Pareja painted in Madrid in the 1600s.

The short version

• Mauch's 1871 claim that outsiders built Great Zimbabwe began from a prejudice and a chain of untested guesses.
• Bent's own finds were African but his conclusion was not, and Hall's digging destroyed evidence.
• Randall-MacIver's 1906 dating showed the site was African and medieval, and placed the burden of proof on the outsider theories.
• UNESCO dates Great Zimbabwe to about 1100-1450, a Shona city of more than 10,000 people tied by gold to the coast.
• Kilwa linked African gold and ivory to the Indian Ocean world and minted its own coins.
• Kongo's Afonso I protested the seizure of free people in 1526, and a Kongo ambassador was accredited by the Pope in 1608.
• Juan Latino and Juan de Pareja show Africans in early modern Europe as scholars and artists, within and beyond slavery.

Sources

1. Tyson, P. (2000, February 22). Mysteries of Great Zimbabwe. NOVA, PBS. pbs.org
2. Bent, J. T. (1892). The ruined cities of Mashonaland: Being a record of excavation and exploration in 1891 (pp. 148-149). Longmans, Green. Internet Archive. archive.org
3. Randall-MacIver, D. (1906). Mediaeval Rhodesia (p. 85). Macmillan. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Great Zimbabwe National Monument. whc.unesco.org
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and ruins of Songo Mnara. whc.unesco.org
6. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Mbanza Kongo, vestiges of the capital of the former Kingdom of Kongo. whc.unesco.org
7. Ibn Battuta. (1929). Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (H. A. R. Gibb, Trans.; Kilwa, pp. 111-113). George Routledge and Sons. Internet Archive. archive.org
8. Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I). (1526). Excerpt of letter to King Joao III of Portugal [English translation]. World History Commons. worldhistorycommons.org
9. Del Campo, M. (2020, July 10). Juan Latino, 16th-century Afro-Spaniard freed slave, poet and Latin professor. Cambridge University Library, Language Collections blog. lib.cam.ac.uk
10. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2023). Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic painter [Exhibition, April 3 to July 16, 2023]. metmuseum.org
11. Wright, E. R. (2016). The epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of race and religion in Renaissance Spain. University of Toronto Press.

"I, Juan Garrido," 1538

On 27 September 1538, in Mexico City, a man petitioned Emperor Charles V for a reward for his services to the Spanish crown. In the historian Dylan Cobban's translation, the petition opens: "I, Juan Garrido, black resident of this city." Garrido had been born in the Kingdom of Kongo around 1480. He came to Lisbon around 1495, was baptized there, and by 1502 or 1503 had crossed to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean. Between 1508 and 1519 he took part in Spanish invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Guatemala and Florida. In 1521 he was present at the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital.

His petition makes a striking claim. Garrido said he was the first person in the Americas to sow wheat, and he insisted that it had been his own idea, not an order from Hernan Cortes. He also led enslaved Africans on a gold-mining expedition in 1528. Cobban's conclusion is that Garrido had real agency and was also entangled in Spain's machinery of conquest and extraction. The historian Matthew Restall, in a 2000 study called "Black Conquistadors," showed that armed Africans like him were common in the early Spanish invasions, not rare exceptions.

This lesson has two halves. The first meets Africans who arrived in the Americas a century before 1619, as soldiers, guides and laborers. The second teaches you to use the largest database on the slave trade, step by step, to answer a question that matters for every African American family: where did the captives come from?

Esteban: a guide across the continent

In 1528 a Spanish expedition of several hundred men under Panfilo de Narvaez landed in Florida and fell apart. Eight years later, four survivors walked into a Spanish settlement in northern Mexico, having crossed what is now Texas and northern Mexico on foot. One of them, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, wrote the account. In Fanny Bandelier's 1905 translation, his list of the four ends:

The fourth was Estevanico, an Arab negro from Azamor.

Azamor, now Azemmour, is a town on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Esteban, as he is more often called, was enslaved, yet in Cabeza de Vaca's account he repeatedly went ahead to make contact with Native peoples and to negotiate for the group. In 1539 he scouted ahead of an expedition led by the friar Marcos de Niza into what is now New Mexico. The National Park Service records that he was the first non-Native explorer to reach the Zuni town of Hawikuh, and that he was killed there soon after making contact. Written records and Zuni oral histories differ on exactly what happened.

Bottom line: Africans, enslaved and free, were in the Americas from the first decades of European invasion, as soldiers, settlers, guides and forced laborers, about a century before 1619.

1619: the "20. and odd"

The first recorded arrival of Africans in English Virginia comes from a letter written in January 1620 by the colonist John Rolfe. The spelling is his own:

About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope ... He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualles (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could.

Rolfe got some details wrong, and later research fills them in. The National Park Service explains that the ship was the White Lion, an English privateer sailing under Dutch authority, and that it reached Old Point Comfort on 25 August 1619. Its captives had been seized in a battle in the Gulf of Mexico from the São João Bautista, a slave ship carrying some 350 Africans bound for Spain's colonies. They came from the kingdom of Ndongo in present-day Angola, the same kingdom Njinga would rule from 1624. Two of them, Antoney and Isabella, appear in a later Virginia census with their son William, the first known child of African descent born in English North America.

Notice what the source does and does not say. Rolfe records a sale for food. He does not record the captives' names, languages or homes. Those came from other evidence, and that is exactly the kind of evidence the rest of this lesson uses.

Reading the database: worked example one

The SlaveVoyages project combines records of more than 36,000 Atlantic slaving voyages with careful estimates for voyages whose records are lost. Its estimates divide the African coast into eight embarkation regions, the stretches of coast where ships loaded captives. Historians David Eltis and David Richardson define them from north to south: Senegambia; Sierra Leone; the Windward Coast; the Gold Coast; the Bight of Benin; the Bight of Biafra; West Central Africa; and Southeast Africa. Here is the procedure, worked end to end.

• Step 1. State the question exactly. Of the captives who survived the crossing and landed in mainland North America, from which African regions did their ships sail?
• Step 2. Choose the right table. Use the Estimates page, because many voyages left no surviving records and the estimates fill those gaps. Choose people disembarked, not embarked, because the question is about people who arrived.
• Step 3. Set the variables. Rows: embarkation regions. Columns: broad disembarkation regions. Years: the full range, 1501 to 1866.
• Step 4. Read the column for mainland North America and convert each number into a share of the column's total.

Step 5 is to say what the table shows, in a sentence that a reader could check. Captives who landed in mainland North America came from all along the coast, but above all from West Central Africa and Senegambia, which tie at about 24 percent each, followed by the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. No single region supplied a majority. The people who became African Americans came from many peoples, not one.

Bottom line: A good data claim states the question, the table used, the filters chosen and the result in numbers someone else could reproduce.

Worked example two: change the destination

Now change one input. Keep every step the same, but read the column for Brazil instead.

The answer flips. Senegambia, tied for first place in North America, supplied barely 2 percent of Brazil's captives. The Bight of Benin, under 3 percent for North America, supplied 18 percent of Brazil's. And West Central Africa, a quarter of North America's arrivals, supplied seven in ten of Brazil's.

Why? Eltis and Richardson point to the winds and ocean currents of the age of sail. They created, in effect, two separate trading systems. In the north, voyages began in Europe and North America. In the south, voyages began in Brazil itself and ran straight across the South Atlantic to Angola and back. Geography and the organization of the trade, not chance, decided who went where.

Bottom line: Changing one input, the destination, reverses the ranking of African regions, because the Atlantic trade ran on separate northern and southern systems shaped by winds and currents.

Inside North America: the same method, smaller regions

The database can also split mainland North America into smaller regions. Run the same steps with specific disembarkation regions as the rows, and the differences inside the future United States appear.

Each region drew its own mix. Virginia's captives came most often through the Bight of Biafra, the coast of the Igbo and their neighbors. South Carolina and Georgia drew heavily on West Central Africa, the Kongo world of Lesson 3, and Lesson 10 shows how that background may have shaped the Stono Rebellion of 1739. The Gulf states, many of them French and Spanish colonies at the time, drew above all on Senegambia. When historians speak of African influences on Black culture in the United States, these regional mixes are part of the reason the influences differ from place to place.

What the numbers cannot tell you

Use the database with care. First, an embarkation region is a stretch of coast, not a birthplace. Many captives were marched long distances from the interior before they ever saw a ship. Second, the estimates are estimates. The project fills gaps in the surviving records with calculations, and scholars revise them as new voyages are found. Third, not every captive in North America came straight from Africa. A separate SlaveVoyages database of more than 37,000 voyages traces trading inside the Americas, including captives carried on from the Caribbean.

Finally, every number in these tables is a count of people. Each one had a name, a language and a family. The project's African Origins database records the African names of captives freed from ships seized during the last decades of the trade, and invites listeners to help identify the languages those names came from. Lesson 6 turns from counting people to hearing one of them.

Bottom line: The data show patterns across millions of lives, but an embarkation region is not a hometown, an estimate is not a certainty, and a statistic is not a person.

Common misconceptions

• The first Africans in North America arrived in 1619. Africans such as Juan Garrido and Esteban were in Florida, Mexico and the Southwest a century earlier. 1619 marks the first recorded arrival in English Virginia.
• African Americans' ancestors all came from one part of Africa. Captives landing in mainland North America came from every region of the coast, with no single region supplying a majority.
• Every part of the Americas drew captives from the same places. Brazil drew seven in ten from West Central Africa; even inside North America, Virginia, the Carolinas and the Gulf drew different mixes.
• Embarkation region tells you a person's ethnic group. It tells you where a ship loaded. Captives often came from far inland and from many peoples.
• Africans in the early Spanish Americas were all enslaved laborers. Some, like Garrido, were free soldiers and settlers who took part in conquest, while many others were enslaved.

Summing up

• Juan Garrido, born in Kongo, fought in Spanish conquests and claimed to have sown the first wheat in the Americas; Esteban, from Morocco, crossed the continent and died at Hawikuh in 1539.
• The "20. and odd" Africans who reached Virginia in August 1619 came from Ndongo, in present-day Angola, via a captured slave ship.
• A data claim states the question, table, filters and result. For mainland North America, West Central Africa and Senegambia tie at about 24 percent each.
• Changing the destination to Brazil flips the result: seven in ten came from West Central Africa, because winds and currents made a separate southern trading system.
• Inside North America, the Chesapeake, the Carolinas and Georgia, and the Gulf drew different African mixes.
• Embarkation regions are coasts, not hometowns, and the estimates are revised as research continues.

Sources

1. Cobban, D. (2025, September 4). The story of Juan Garrido. History Workshop. historyworkshop.org.uk
2. Restall, M. (2000). Black conquistadors: Armed Africans in early Spanish America. The Americas, 57(2), 171-205.
3. Cabeza de Vaca, A. N. (1905). The journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 (F. Bandelier, Trans.). A. S. Barnes. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Mission La Purisima Concepcion at Hawikuh. Spanish Colonial Missions of the Southwest travel itinerary. nps.gov
5. Rolfe, J. (1620, January). Letter to Sir Edwin Sandys. In National Park Service, NPS source book: Jamestown, In the words of contemporaries. npshistory.com
6. National Park Service. (n.d.). Arrival of the first Africans in 1619. nps.gov
7. SlaveVoyages Consortium. (n.d.). Estimates: Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1501-1866 [Database; embarkation by broad and specific disembarkation region, consulted October 2026]. slavevoyages.org
8. Eltis, D., and Richardson, D. (2025, September 5). Introductory maps to the transatlantic slave trade [From their Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press, 2010]. SlaveVoyages. slavevoyages.org

"Written by Himself," 1789

In 1789 a two-volume book appeared in London with a long title: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Those last three words mattered. Its author was a free Black Londoner and veteran seaman who had once been enslaved, and he was telling the story in his own voice. It opened with a list of hundreds of subscribers who had paid for copies in advance, from the Prince of Wales to the abolitionist Granville Sharp.

Equiano wrote that he was born in 1745 in a village called Essaka, in a region he called Eboe, which historians identify with the Igbo country in what is now southeastern Nigeria. This lesson follows his journey from that village to the coast, across the ocean and finally to freedom. At each stage it steps back to ask what the wider evidence shows, and at the end it asks how far we can trust the story itself.

Captured

Equiano had just turned eleven when it happened. The adults of his village had gone out to work in the fields.

One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both, and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood.

The kidnappers were Africans. Over the following months Equiano was sold from owner to owner, separated from his sister, and carried through regions whose languages he could no longer understand. Another formerly enslaved writer, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, kidnapped as a boy on the Gold Coast and shipped to the Caribbean island of Grenada, faced that fact directly in a book of 1787:

But I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile, and slavery; but if there were no buyers there would be no sellers.

Cugoano's sentence holds two truths together, and so do historians. John Thornton argues in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World that, before about 1680, Africa's economic and military strength "gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed," in the words of his publisher's summary. Europeans did not simply seize the people they bought. African rulers and merchants sold captives taken in war, raids and kidnappings, as well as people condemned for crimes or debt.

The trade's effects on Africa were still severe and long-lasting. The economist Nathan Nunn matched shipping records with documents recording the ethnic origins of enslaved people, and estimated how many people each modern African country lost to the trades. In a 2008 study he found a strong negative relationship: the countries that lost the most people tend to be the poorest today, and his tests point to the trade as a cause. Demand from the Americas drew African states into a cycle of war and raiding that weakened the societies it drained.

Why this matters: Africans were both victims and participants in the trade, and recognizing African sellers does not lessen the responsibility of the buyers whose demand, as Cugoano said, created the market.

To the coast and onto the ship

Six or seven months after he was kidnapped, Equiano reached the sea. He had never seen it, or a European.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board.

Notice what terrified him. Equiano tells you he believed he had fallen into "a world of bad spirits" who were going to kill him, and he asked other captives whether the white men would eat them. Captives from the interior had no way to know what the ships were for, and many feared exactly that. Fear of the unknown was part of the experience that the voyage records cannot capture.

The Middle Passage in numbers and in one voice

The voyage across the Atlantic is called the Middle Passage, the middle leg of a journey that ran from Europe to Africa, from Africa to the Americas, and back to Europe. The SlaveVoyages estimates give its scale. Of about 12.5 million Africans forced aboard ships between 1501 and 1866, about 10.7 million survived to land. Roughly 1.8 million, about one in seven, died at sea, from disease, crowding, violence and despair.

Equiano described the hold without exaggeration:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.

Abolitionists in Britain tried to make the public see that crowding. In 1788 the campaigner Thomas Clarkson commissioned the printer James Phillips to publish a plan of a slave ship, the Brookes, showing rows of human figures packed into its decks. The print showed 482 people. A new law of 1788, the Dolben Act, limited captives by a ship's tonnage and allowed the Brookes 454. Yet the Brookes had carried more than 600 people on two crossings in 1783. More than 7,000 copies of the print were distributed. It is evidence and argument at once: an accurate measurement, drawn in order to shock.

Why this matters: Numbers show the scale of the Middle Passage, and testimony such as Equiano's shows what it meant to the people inside it; a historian needs both.

Resistance at sea

Captives resisted from the moment of capture. Equiano saw people refuse food and be whipped for it. He saw two men, chained together, slip through the ship's netting and jump into the sea, choosing death over slavery. Others fought. The historian Eric Robert Taylor, in If We Must Die, examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions across the history of the trade. Most failed quickly. A few ended with captives taking the ship. Taylor argues that these uprisings ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans, because the threat of revolt made voyages more dangerous and more expensive.

The most famous revolt reached the United States Supreme Court. In 1839, Africans who had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone and sold in Cuba, 53 of them bought by two Spanish planters, were being carried along the Cuban coast on the schooner La Amistad. On 1 July 1839 they seized the ship. Their leader was Sengbe Pieh, known in the United States as Joseph Cinque. The ship ended up in American hands, and the case went to the Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams, then 73, argued their side. In 1841 the Court ruled that they had been illegally enslaved and were free. Thirty-five survivors returned to their homeland.

Why this matters: Shipboard resistance was common, not rare, and it changed how the trade worked, even though most revolts were crushed.

From testimony to a movement

After the crossing, Equiano was landed in Barbados, then taken to Virginia and sold to Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in Britain's Royal Navy, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa. He spent years at sea in war and in trade. Sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, he traded small goods on his own account until he had saved 40 pounds, the price of his freedom. His manumission, the legal act of freeing him, was registered on 11 July 1766.

In London, Equiano and Cugoano joined other Black Britons in petitioning and writing against the trade, and Equiano promoted his book, and abolition with it, on lecture tours around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Their testimony gave abolitionists what statistics could not: the voice of people who had been through it. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807. In the United States, the Constitution had protected the import of captives until 1808, and a law signed in March 1807 banned it from 1 January 1808. Equiano did not live to see either. He married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792, and died in 1797.

Can we trust the story?

Here the narrative itself becomes the problem. In 2005 the literary scholar Vincent Carretta published records he had found: a 1759 London baptism entry and a 1773 Royal Navy muster roll, both giving Equiano's birthplace as Carolina. Carretta concluded that Equiano was almost certainly born in South Carolina and that the account of his African boyhood and capture was probably fiction.

Other scholars disagree. The historian Paul Lovejoy, in a 2006 article, defended Equiano's African birth. Brycchan Carey, editor of an edition of the Narrative, notes that Equiano may have had reasons to give different origins at different times, and he sees no real reason to doubt the essential truth of the account of his African childhood. Both sides agree that records confirm much of the rest of his story, including his years as a naval officer's slave.

How should you use the source, then? Treat the debate itself as evidence of good method. Records written by clerks and officers can be wrong too, and a boy may have been listed as born in Carolina for many reasons. Yet a narrative written thirty years after the events, for a political purpose, also needs checking. The safest course is the historian's course: use the Narrative for what it can show, say clearly what is disputed, and check it against other evidence.

Why this matters: Even the most important testimony has to be sourced; the debate over Equiano's birthplace teaches you to weigh documents against memory without dismissing either.

Common misconceptions

• Europeans captured most enslaved Africans themselves. Most captives were taken by Africans in war, raids and kidnapping and sold at the coast; European demand drove the market, as Cugoano said.
• Because Africans sold captives, Europeans were not responsible. In Cugoano's words, without buyers there would be no sellers. The demand, the ships and the plantations were European and American.
• Captives went passively to their fate. They refused food, jumped overboard and rose against their captors in nearly five hundred known rebellions.
• A famous narrative must be accurate in every detail. Equiano's account is essential evidence, but parts of it are disputed and must be checked like any source.
• The slave trade ended when slavery ended. Britain and the United States banned their Atlantic trades in 1807 and 1808, long before they abolished slavery itself.

What to carry forward

• Equiano's 1789 Narrative traces kidnapping, sale, the coast, the Middle Passage and the long road to freedom in his own words.
• African elites and merchants sold captives to European buyers; Cugoano blamed both, and Nunn's research links the trade to lasting harm in the regions it drained.
• About 1.8 million of the 12.5 million Africans forced aboard ships died at sea.
• The Brookes print of 1788 was accurate measurement used as persuasion, and it reached thousands of readers.
• Captives resisted constantly; Taylor counts nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions, and the Amistad case ended in freedom in 1841.
• The debate over Equiano's birthplace shows how historians weigh a narrative against records.

Sources

1. Equiano, O. (1789). The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Cugoano, Q. O. (1787). Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina. docsouth.unc.edu
3. Thornton, J. (1998). Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1800 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. cambridge.org
4. Nunn, N. (2007). The long-term effects of Africa's slave trades (Working Paper 13367). National Bureau of Economic Research; published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1), 2008. nber.org
5. Understanding Slavery Initiative. (n.d.). Description of a slave ship, about 1788 [Hull Museums, KINCM 1973.73]. understandingslavery.com
6. Taylor, E. R. (2006). If we must die: Shipboard insurrections in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Louisiana State University Press. lsupress.org
7. National Archives. (n.d.). The Amistad case [Educator resources]. archives.gov
8. National Archives. (n.d.). Act prohibiting importation of slaves [1807]. DocsTeach. docsteach.org
9. History News Network. (2005, September 22). Maryland professor disputes parts of Equiano's 18th-century tale of Middle Passage [Reprinted from the Baltimore Sun]. historynewsnetwork.org
10. Carey, B. (2005). Olaudah Equiano: A brief biography. brycchancarey.com
11. Lovejoy, P. E. (2006). Autobiography and memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African. Slavery and Abolition, 27(3), 317-347.

A sale in the rain, March 1859

On 2 and 3 March 1859, at the Ten Broeck race course outside Savannah, Georgia, a slaveholder named Pierce M. Butler put up for auction 436 men, women and children from his rice and cotton plantations near Darien. Butler lived in Philadelphia, in a free state. He had lost money in the financial crash of 1857 and 1858, and he was selling people to pay his creditors. It rained hard for both days. Of the 436 announced, 429 were sold, for $303,850. A Georgia Historical Society marker, put up in 2008, records that the breakup of families and the loss of home became part of African American heritage, remembered as "the weeping time."

That sale poses a problem worth working out. The United States had banned the import of captives from abroad on 1 January 1808. Why, fifty-one years later, was a single owner able to sell more than four hundred people at once, and why were buyers ready to pay more than $300,000 for them? The answer lies not across the Atlantic but inside the United States.

The numbers that make the problem

Start with two figures you have already met. Over the whole Atlantic trade, mainland North America received about 389,000 captives from Africa. The National Archives notes that from 1790 until the 1808 ban, Southern slaveholders imported about 80,000 Africans. Now look at the Census Bureau's own counts of the enslaved population.

The enslaved population grew more than fivefold in seventy years, most of it after imports had stopped. Births outnumbered deaths, generation after generation. The law treated every child born to an enslaved mother as enslaved, so each birth added to the wealth of an owner. That is the first half of the answer: by 1859 slavery in the United States reproduced itself, without any need for the Atlantic trade.

In short: After 1808 the enslaved population grew by natural increase, from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost 4 million in 1860, so slaveholders no longer needed the Atlantic trade to expand.

Cotton and the move south

The second half of the answer is cotton. Eli Whitney received a patent for his cotton gin in 1794. The machine pulled seeds from cotton fiber far faster than hand work could, which made cotton profitable across the interior South. The National Archives sums up the result. The yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800. By 1850 the United States grew three-quarters of the world's cotton, and the South supplied three-fifths of the nation's exports, mostly in cotton. There were six slave states in 1790 and fifteen in 1860, and by 1860 about one in three Southerners was enslaved. The gin did not reduce the need for enslaved labor. It multiplied it.

The new cotton lands lay in the Lower South: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and later Texas. The older states of the Upper South, above all Virginia and Maryland, had more enslaved people than their tobacco and grain farms needed. So people were moved south, by the hundreds of thousands. How many, and how? The economic historian Jonathan Pritchett, reviewing the evidence in 2001, notes that estimates range from about 835,000 people moved from exporting to importing states between 1790 and 1860 to more than a million. Some went with owners who moved their whole plantations west. Many were sold to traders who bought in the Upper South and resold in the markets of New Orleans, Natchez and other cotton towns. How large a share were sold remains disputed, with estimates running up to 70 percent and beyond.

The movement left paper trails. The 1807 law that banned imports also required every vessel of 40 tons or more carrying enslaved people along the coast to file duplicate manifests at the ports of departure and arrival, each with a pledge that the person had not been imported after 1807. Thousands of those manifests survive in the National Archives, and families still search them for ancestors' names.

In short: Cotton created demand in the Lower South, and between about 835,000 and more than a million people were moved there from the Upper South between 1790 and 1860, many of them sold by traders.

Inside the trade: Solomon Northup's testimony

Solomon Northup was a free Black man from New York, a husband, father, farmer and violinist. In 1841 two men calling themselves Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton hired him to play the violin for a circus and brought him to Washington. There, after an evening with them, he fell ill, lost his senses, and woke "alone, in utter darkness, and in chains." His 1853 book, Twelve Years a Slave, describes where he was: a slave pen known as Williams' pen, where the trader James H. Burch held him, a short walk from the Capitol:

Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave's chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!

Northup was taken by way of Richmond and shipped south on the brig Orleans, one of about forty captives aboard. In New Orleans he was sold from the pen of the trader Theophilus Freeman. There he watched a mother named Eliza beg a buyer to purchase her together with her son Randall and her daughter Emily. The buyer said he could not afford it, took only the boy, and Freeman threatened Eliza with his whip to stop her weeping. Northup himself spent twelve years enslaved on Louisiana plantations before friends in New York proved his freedom and he was rescued in 1853.

Northup's account is valuable because it is detailed, specific and checkable: he names traders, ships and places, and the legal papers of his rescue survive. It also shows something the statistics hide. The domestic trade worked through ordinary-looking buildings, steamships and city streets, in the national capital as well as in the Deep South.

In short: Northup's narrative shows the domestic trade from inside, from a pen near the Capitol to a sale room in New Orleans, and it is precise enough to be checked.

The Weeping Time, read closely

The fullest account of the Butler sale was written by Mortimer Thomson, a reporter for the New York Tribune who signed himself Q. K. Philander Doesticks. He did not announce himself. By his own account he moved through the crowd with pencil and catalogue, keeping up the appearance of a knowing buyer. The American Anti-Slavery Society reprinted his report as a pamphlet the same year. It is detailed, and it is also a piece of antislavery journalism, written to move Northern readers. You should use it with both facts in mind.

Its details are hard to forget. The people sold were listed by number. The highest price for a family, $6,180, was paid for Sally Walker and her five children. The highest for a single man, $1,750, was paid for William, described as a carpenter and caulker; the highest for a woman, $1,250, for Jane, a cotton hand and house servant. An older couple, Anson and Violet, brought the lowest price, $250 each. When it was over, Butler handed each person he had sold one dollar in quarters.

The pamphlet also shows enslaved people trying to shape what happened to them. A young man named Jeffrey, sold for $1,310, went to his new owner and pleaded with him to buy Dorcas, the woman he was engaged to marry. The buyer agreed, if the price stayed reasonable. The next morning Jeffrey asked everyone he knew to speak for her. But Dorcas was put up for sale together with her family of four others, the buyer would not take them all, and the couple were parted. As the last family stepped down from the block, the reporter wrote, the rain stopped.

For a long time the Butler sale was called the largest single slave auction in American history. In 2022 a graduate student in Charleston found an 1835 newspaper advertisement offering about 600 people for sale from a rice planter's estate. Historians revise even well-known facts when new evidence appears. Meanwhile the site itself has become a debate about memory. The race course is long gone, replaced by a school, an interstate highway and industrial land, and in 2025 its owners listed the property for sale. The historian Anne C. Bailey, author of a 2017 book on the Weeping Time, has urged that the land be bought and given to the community, while a descendant of people sold there, Annette Holmes, has called for a learning center on the site. Lesson 32 returns to such debates.

Common misconceptions

• Slavery in the United States depended on continued imports from Africa. After 1808 it grew by natural increase, to almost 4 million people by 1860.
• The slave trade ended in 1808. Only the import of captives from abroad was banned. A domestic trade moved hundreds of thousands of people south until the Civil War.
• The cotton gin reduced the need for enslaved labor. It made cotton so profitable that slavery spread across the Lower South.
• Slave trading happened only in the Deep South. Pens operated in Washington, Richmond and other Upper South cities, which were sources of people sold south.
• Enslaved people at auctions were passive. Many, like Jeffrey and Eliza, pleaded, bargained and sought help to keep families together, even when they could not prevail.

Looking back

• The Butler sale of March 1859 put 436 people up for auction to pay a Philadelphia slaveholder's debts; 429 were sold for $303,850.
• The enslaved population grew from 697,681 in 1790 to 3,953,760 in 1860, mostly by births after imports ended in 1808.
• Cotton, made profitable by the gin, drew between about 835,000 and more than a million people from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1790 and 1860.
• Coastwise manifests, traders' pens and sale records left a paper trail that historians and descendants still use.
• Solomon Northup's narrative shows the trade from inside, from Washington to New Orleans.
• The Tribune's report on the Weeping Time is vivid antislavery journalism that must be read for its purpose, and the "largest sale" claim itself has been revised.

Sources

1. Doesticks, Q. K. P. [M. Thomson]. (1859). Great auction sale of slaves, at Savannah, Georgia, March 2d and 3d, 1859 [Reprinted from the New York Tribune]. American Anti-Slavery Society. Internet Archive. archive.org
2. Georgia Historical Society. (2008). Largest slave sale in Georgia history [Historical marker text]. georgiahistory.com
3. Gibson, C., and Jung, K. (2002). Historical census statistics on population totals by race, 1790 to 1990 (Working Paper No. 56, Table 1). U.S. Census Bureau. census.gov
4. National Archives. (n.d.). Eli Whitney's patent for the cotton gin [Educator resources]. archives.gov
5. Pritchett, J. B. (2001). Quantitative estimates of the United States interregional slave trade, 1820-1860. Journal of Economic History, 61(2), 467-475. cambridge.org
6. National Archives at Atlanta. (n.d.). Slave manifests. archives.gov
7. Northup, S. (1853). Twelve years a slave. Derby and Miller. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
8. Felton, E. (2025, September 2). 436 people were put up for sale here. Will the site now be sold or saved? The Washington Post, reprinted by the Anchorage Daily News. adn.com
9. Bailey, A. C. (2017). The weeping time: Memory and the largest slave auction in American history. Cambridge University Press.

A woman who won her freedom, 1656

On 20 January 1656, a jury in Northumberland County, Virginia, decided that a woman named Elizabeth Key should be free. She had been born around 1630 to an enslaved woman of African birth or descent and an English planter, Thomas Key, who sat in Virginia's assembly. As a child she was bound to another planter for nine years, on terms meant to end in her freedom. Instead she was held for about twenty, and when her last owner died in 1655, his estate inventory listed her among his "Negroes," apart from his servants, a sign that the appraisers treated her as enslaved for life.

Key sued. Her case went from the county court to the colony's General Court, which ruled against her, and then to the General Assembly. A committee of burgesses studied the evidence and sided with her, for two reasons. She had been baptized and could, by report, give a good account of her faith. And, the committee wrote:

by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begott by a free-man ought to bee free.

On 21 July 1656 the county court declared her free, ordered that she be paid for her extra years of service, and on the same day she and William Grinsted announced that they would marry. Six years later, Virginia changed its law so that no woman in her position could ever win that case again.

The wrong answer to debug

Many people assume that slavery in English North America was racial, lifelong and inherited from the moment the first Africans arrived in 1619. If that were true, Elizabeth Key's case could not have happened. Her lawyers argued from a father's free status and from baptism, and they won.

The wrong answer hides the most important point of this lesson. Racial slavery was built, step by step, by people who wrote laws and decided cases. Historians call race a social construction: a way of sorting people that societies invent and enforce, rather than a fact of nature that simply exists. Follow the Virginia record year by year and you can watch the construction happen.

1640: a sentence for life

In July 1640 three servants who had run away from their master, Hugh Gwyn, were brought back from Maryland. The General Court ordered all three whipped. Then it treated them differently. The two Europeans, a Dutchman named Victor and a Scot named James Gregory, were to serve out their indentures, plus one more year for their master and three for the colony. The third received a different sentence:

the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.

Same offense, same court, different futures. Historians point to this ruling as an early moment when a Virginia court separated Europeans and Africans, turning a term of service into a lifetime because of who a man was.

The upshot: In 1640 a Virginia court gave an African runaway lifelong servitude while his European companions received extra years, one of the earliest recorded racial distinctions in the colony's law.

The 1650s: a world still in motion

The picture in the 1650s was still mixed. On Virginia's Eastern Shore lived Anthony Johnson, a free Black planter who owned land and cattle and went to court like any other freeholder. In 1655 a Black man named John Casor told a visitor that he had come to Virginia under an indenture for seven or eight years and that Johnson had kept him seven years too long. Johnson answered that he had never seen any indenture and held Casor for life. Johnson at first let him go, then sued the neighbor who had taken Casor in. The Northampton County court ruled for Johnson and ordered Casor returned to him.

Hold that case beside Elizabeth Key's. A free African could own land, sue and win; an African could be held for life by another African; an African woman could win her freedom. In the 1650s, status depended on contracts, baptism, parentage and power, and race was becoming the decisive factor but was not yet the only one.

The upshot: In the 1650s free Africans like Anthony Johnson owned property and used the courts, which shows that lifelong racial slavery was not yet fixed in law.

1662 and 1667: two laws that closed the doors

Elizabeth Key had escaped through two doors: a free father and Christian baptism. Virginia's assembly shut both. In December 1662 it passed this act:

WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother ...

Under English common law a child's status had followed the father's. The 1662 act reversed that rule for Virginia. Lawyers later used the Latin phrase partus sequitur ventrem, the offspring follows the womb. Its effect was cruelly practical: a child born to an enslaved woman was enslaved even if the father was a free Englishman, including the woman's owner. Every birth to an enslaved mother added to an owner's property, which is why Lesson 7's census figures grew so fast.

Five years later, in 1667, the assembly closed the second door, declaring that "the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome." Its stated purpose was to let owners have enslaved children baptized without fear of losing them.

The upshot: The acts of 1662 and 1667 made slavery hereditary through the mother and made baptism irrelevant to freedom, closing the legal paths Elizabeth Key had used.

1705: race written into the code

By 1705 Virginia gathered its rules into a single slave code, "An act concerning Servants and Slaves." It declared that servants brought into the colony who had not been Christians in their native country:

shall be accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterward.

The same act protected one group from certain punishments. No master could "whip a christian white servant naked" without an order from a justice of the peace. Enslaved Africans received no such protection. Look closely at that phrase. The law did not simply describe whiteness; it gave whiteness legal privileges. Being white came to mean being protected from some of what could be done to Black people, and that is what historians mean when they say the law constructed race.

The upshot: The 1705 code tied slavery to non-Christian origin and protected "christian white" servants, writing a racial hierarchy into law.

Labor, and the economy enslaved people made

Laws defined the status. Labor filled the days. Most enslaved people worked in the fields, growing tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, and later cotton and sugar across the Lower South. Solomon Northup described how cotton picking was measured on the Louisiana plantations where he was held. Each picker's cotton was weighed every night. An ordinary day's work was two hundred pounds, and anyone who brought in less was whipped. A woman named Patsey, the most remarkable picker on the bayou, often brought in five hundred.

Others were skilled workers. As a young man Frederick Douglass was hired out in the Baltimore shipyards as a caulker, sealing the seams of ships. He described what happened to his wages:

I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh.

Enslaved people also built small economies of their own, and those economies mattered. Northup earned "Sunday money" by working on days off, and once received seventeen dollars for playing his violin at a party, a sum that made him, he wrote, look like a millionaire to his fellows. Equiano, as you saw in Lesson 6, traded goods until he could buy his freedom. Gardens, crafts and hired labor gave people a little money, food and choice, and sometimes a way out.

The upshot: Enslaved people's labor in fields and trades produced the South's wealth, while their own small economies of gardens, crafts and wages carved out what independence they could.

1857: the Supreme Court's answer

The construction of race reached the nation's highest court. Dred Scott, an enslaved man, had been taken by his owner, an army surgeon, to Illinois and to Fort Snelling in the free Territory of Wisconsin. In 1846 he and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in St. Louis. On 6 March 1857 Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the Court's opinion. Taney held that people of African descent whose ancestors had been brought to the country and sold as slaves were not citizens of the United States and could not sue in its courts. He claimed that at the founding they had for a century been regarded:

as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect ...

The Court also ruled that Congress had no power to ban slavery from a federal territory. Justice Benjamin R. Curtis answered with history. In his dissent he pointed out that when the Articles of Confederation were ratified, free Black men in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina were citizens of those states, and those who met the other qualifications could vote "on equal terms with other citizens." The decision pushed the country closer to civil war, and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments later overturned it, as Lesson 17 shows.

The upshot: In Dred Scott the Supreme Court made race a bar to citizenship nationwide, while Justice Curtis's dissent showed that free Black men had been citizens and voters at the founding.

Common misconceptions

• Slavery in English America was racial and hereditary from 1619. It was built by laws and rulings over decades, from the Punch ruling of 1640 to the code of 1705.
• Race is a fixed biological category that law simply recognized. Laws such as the 1705 code defined who counted as white and attached privileges to it.
• No African in early Virginia was free. Anthony Johnson owned land and won lawsuits, and Elizabeth Key won her freedom in 1656.
• Converting to Christianity freed enslaved people. After 1667 Virginia law said baptism did not change a person's bondage.
• Free Black Americans had never been citizens before the Civil War. Justice Curtis showed that free Black men were citizens and voters in five states at the founding.

Pulling it together

• Elizabeth Key won her freedom in 1656 by arguing from her free father and her baptism.
• The 1640 ruling on John Punch gave an African lifelong servitude while European runaways received extra years.
• In the 1650s free Africans such as Anthony Johnson owned land and sued, showing that status was not yet fixed by race.
• The 1662 act made status follow the mother; the 1667 act made baptism irrelevant; the 1705 code wrote "christian white" privilege into law.
• Enslaved labor ran on quotas, hiring out and skilled trades, while enslaved people built small economies of their own.
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) denied citizenship to people of African descent; Justice Curtis's dissent recorded Black voters at the founding.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia Virginia. (n.d.). Elizabeth Key (fl. 1655-1660). Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
2. Virginia General Court. (1640). General Court responds to runaway servants and slaves [Minutes, 9 July 1640]. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
3. Northampton County Court. (1655). Court ruling on Anthony Johnson and his servant. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
4. Virginia General Assembly. (1662). Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother [Hening's Statutes at Large, vol. 2, p. 170]. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
5. Virginia General Assembly. (1667). An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage [Hening, vol. 2, p. 260]. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
6. Virginia General Assembly. (1705). An act concerning servants and slaves [Hening, vol. 3, pp. 447-462]. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
7. Northup, S. (1853). Twelve years a slave. Derby and Miller. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
8. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Anti-Slavery Office. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
9. Supreme Court of the United States. (1857). Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (opinion of Chief Justice Taney; dissent of Justice Curtis). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
10. National Archives. (n.d.). Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Milestone Documents. archives.gov

A jar with a question, 1857

On 16 August 1857, in the Old Edgefield District of South Carolina, an enslaved potter cut two lines of verse into the wet clay of a large storage jar. The first line reads:

I wonder where is all my relation

The second line offers friendship to all, and to every nation. The potter signed his work "Dave." After emancipation he took the surname Drake, and he is known today as David Drake, born into slavery around 1800 and working in Edgefield's potteries for most of his life. Curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum read the 1857 verse as speaking to the separation of families that slavery made routine. Drake is the only Black potter in antebellum Edgefield known to have signed his own work. That was itself an act of defiance, because in 1834 South Carolina outlawed teaching enslaved people to read and write.

Drake's question, "where is all my relation," could stand for a whole people. The captives you met in Module 2 came from many nations and spoke many languages. Enslavers tried to strip them of names, families and memory. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century there was an African American people with its own churches, songs, speech, crafts and leaders. This lesson compares the forms that people made, and then compares the names they chose for themselves.

Faith remade

Religion was the first place many enslaved people made something of their own. They took up Christianity, as Kongo's Christians had in Africa, and heard in its stories of deliverance a message their owners did not intend. They sang spirituals, religious songs created by enslaved people, often in a call-and-response style in which a leader sings and a group answers. This course describes songs rather than reprinting their words.

Frederick Douglass, who heard and sang such songs as a boy on a Maryland plantation, insisted that outsiders misread them:

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.

Of the songs themselves he wrote that "every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains." Worship also took African forms. In the ring shout, as the National Endowment for the Arts describes it, worshippers move counterclockwise in a ring while a stickman beats time on the wooden floor, others clap in interlocking rhythms, and a lead singer and chorus answer each other. The tradition has been linked to burial rituals in West Africa and survived among enslaved Africans, especially in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The McIntosh County Shouters of Georgia, among its last active practitioners, were named National Heritage Fellows in 1993.

Free Black communities in the North built institutions around their faith. On 12 April 1787 in Philadelphia, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society, a mutual aid society whose members paid a shilling a month for burial payments, help for widows, apprenticeships for children, and school tuition. In 1794 Allen led members into Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, while others followed Jones to the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.

Worth holding on to: Enslaved and free Black people remade Christianity and their own institutions in their own image, and their songs were, in Douglass's words, a testimony against slavery rather than a sign of contentment.

Speech and community on the coast: the Gullah Geechee

On the Sea Islands and coast of the Carolinas, Georgia and northern Florida, African culture survived especially strongly. The National Park Service describes the Gullah Geechee people as descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved on the coastal rice, Sea Island cotton and indigo plantations. Their relative isolation let them keep many African traditions in their foodways, arts, crafts and spiritual life. They also created a new language, Gullah, a creole spoken nowhere else in the world. A creole is a language that forms when speakers of different languages build a new, full language together.

Remember Lesson 5's table: captives landed in the Carolinas and Georgia came mostly from West Central Africa, Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast. Gullah grew from that mixture. In 2006 Congress designated the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, running from Pender County, North Carolina, to St. Johns County, Florida, to protect what that history produced.

Making things: craft as a record

Material objects carry culture too. The Metropolitan Museum's 2022 exhibition Hear Me Now gathered about fifty pieces of stoneware from Old Edgefield, including Drake's great storage jars and small face vessels whose makers went unrecorded. The curators presented them as evidence of the lived experience, artistic agency and material knowledge of enslaved people. The Smithsonian curators note that some scholars connect the face vessels to African religious practices carried to South Carolina. Drake also signed other potters' names, among them Mark, Abram and Baddler, beside his own, which makes the jars a record of a community of craftsmen, not only of one man.

Worth holding on to: Language, worship and craft were how a new people formed, and objects like Drake's jars preserve voices that written records often left out.

Writing back: Phillis Wheatley

The question of identity was also argued in print. Phillis Wheatley was brought from Africa to Boston in 1761, aged seven or eight, and enslaved in the household of John Wheatley. Within sixteen months she had learned English. In 1773 a London printer published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. So that "none might have the least Ground for disputing their Original," the book printed an attestation signed by eighteen Boston men, among them Governor Thomas Hutchinson and John Hancock, assuring readers that she had really written them. Here is one poem in full:

'TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Read it twice. The first four lines give thanks, in the religious language of her time, for the faith she found. The last four turn on the reader. She quotes the scornful view of "our sable race," then answers it with an instruction addressed to Christians themselves: remember that Black people are equal heirs of salvation. A teenage enslaved woman, writing under the eyes of the men who had to vouch for her, claimed spiritual equality and rebuked white Christians in eight lines.

Worth holding on to: Wheatley's poem pairs gratitude for her faith with a direct rebuke to those who scorned "our sable race," and the attestation shows how much her readers doubted that she could write at all.

What shall we call ourselves? A table of names

Names are claims. Across two centuries, Black Americans argued about what to call themselves, and each answer said something about who they were. The table compares the main terms.

Reading the table

Read down the "Who used it" column first. Each name was promoted by Black institutions and leaders, not simply handed down by others. The first independent organizations called themselves African, in the decades when many members had been born in Africa or were one generation removed from it. The Colored Conventions, beginning in 1830 at Philadelphia's Bethel church, used the word that free Black Northerners commonly used for themselves.

The capital letter mattered too. Black leaders had long pressed newspapers to capitalize Negro, as they did other peoples' names. When The New York Times agreed in 1930, its style book called the change "an act of recognition of racial self-respect." In the 1960s activists such as Stokely Carmichael pushed to replace Negro with Black, yet a 1969 Gallup poll still found Negro the most preferred term. The sociologist Tom W. Smith traced these shifts in a 1992 study of changing racial labels. The newest term is older than it looks: a sermon printed in Philadelphia in 1782 was signed "By an African American," according to the Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro.

Today Black and African American are both widely used, and many people use them interchangeably, while some prefer one or the other. Notice the question beneath the table: whether this people is defined by color, by African heritage or by American citizenship. Each generation answered for itself.

Worth holding on to: Every major name, from African to African American, was chosen and promoted by Black people themselves, and each made a claim about heritage, dignity or citizenship.

Common misconceptions

• Singing showed that enslaved people were content. Douglass called that idea the greatest of mistakes: enslaved people sang most when they were most unhappy.
• Slavery erased African culture in the United States. The Gullah language, the ring shout and many crafts and foodways carried African traditions forward.
• No enslaved person could read or write. South Carolina banned teaching enslaved people in 1834, which shows that some did learn; Drake signed and wrote verse on his jars.
• Wheatley's poem simply accepts her enslavement. It thanks God for her faith but rebukes Christians who scorn "our sable race" and claims equality before God.
• African American has always been the correct term. Names changed over two centuries, each one chosen by Black communities for reasons of their time.

What you now know

• David Drake's signed and inscribed jars, made in defiance of an 1834 law against teaching enslaved people to write, preserve an enslaved potter's voice.
• Spirituals and the ring shout joined Christian faith to African musical and religious forms; Douglass heard the songs as testimony against slavery.
• Free Black Philadelphians built the Free African Society in 1787 and Bethel AME Church in 1794.
• The Gullah Geechee people of the southern coast created a creole language and kept many African traditions.
• Phillis Wheatley's 1773 poems claimed spiritual equality, and the attestation printed with them reveals the doubt she faced.
• The names African, Colored, Negro, Black and African American each record a moment when Black communities defined themselves.

Sources

1. Rothschild, J. V., and Umberger, L. (2023, March 14). David "Dave" Drake: Potter and poet. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Voices. smithsonianmag.com
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2022). Hear me now: The Black potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina [Exhibition, September 9, 2022 to February 5, 2023]. metmuseum.org
3. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave (chap. 2). Anti-Slavery Office. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. National Endowment for the Arts. (n.d.). McIntosh County Shouters [National Heritage Fellowship, 1993]. arts.gov
5. National Park Service. (n.d.). Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. nps.gov
6. Kammerer, E. (2016). Free African Society. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Rutgers University. philadelphiaencyclopedia.org
7. Wheatley, P. (1773). Poems on various subjects, religious and moral. Archibald Bell. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
8. Colored Conventions Project. (n.d.). About the conventions. University of Delaware and Penn State University. coloredconventions.org
9. Singh, A. (2023, May 25). A note on historical language: "Negro," "Colored," "Black," and "African American". African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology, Lehigh University. scalar.lehigh.edu
10. Schoenbaum, H. (2026, February 24). How the Rev. Jesse Jackson helped popularize the term "African American." Associated Press, in the New York Amsterdam News. amsterdamnews.com
11. Smith, T. W. (1992). Changing racial labels: From "colored" to "Negro" to "Black" to "African American." Public Opinion Quarterly, 56(4), 496-514.

Sunday, 9 September 1739

On Sunday, 9 September 1739, the one day of the week when South Carolina's planters let enslaved people work for themselves, about twenty men gathered near a branch of the Stono River in St. Paul's Parish, near Charleston. An account written within weeks by an unnamed colonial official describes what happened next:

Some Angola Negroes assembled to the number of Twenty; and one who was called Jemmy was their Captain. They surprised a Warehouse belonging to Mr. Hutchenson at a place called Stonehow [Stono]; they there killed Mr. Robert Bathurst and Mr. Gibbs, plundered the House and took a pretty many small Arms and Powder, which were there for Sale.

Armed, the rebels turned south along the main road. They burned houses and killed the white people they found in them, but the account notes that they spared one tavern keeper, Mr. Wallace, saying he "was a good Man and kind to his Slaves." At another house an enslaved man hid his owner and talked the rebels out of their search. Others joined the march:

Several Negroes joined them, they calling out Liberty, marched on with Colours displayed and two Drums beating, pursuing all the white people they met with, and killing Man Woman and Child when they could come up to them.

By afternoon the force had grown to sixty, some said a hundred. This lesson follows that march south, to find out where it was going, and then follows a far larger revolution that began in the French colony of Saint-Domingue half a century later.

Why they marched south

The same 1739 account begins not with the revolt but with a promise. Spain, the official wrote, had published a proclamation at St. Augustine in which "the King of Spain (then at Peace with Great Britain) promised Protection and freedom to all Negroes Slaves that would resort thither." Some people enslaved in the Carolinas had already escaped there and been welcomed, and the news spread. The Stono rebels were heading for that freedom, toward the Spanish town of St. Augustine in Florida.

Just north of St. Augustine stood something unique in North America. By the late 1600s, the National Park Service explains, enslaved Africans fleeing the British colonies could claim freedom and asylum in Spanish Florida if they accepted Catholicism and pledged to serve the Spanish Crown. In 1738 Governor Manuel de Montiano granted these freedom seekers land about two miles north of the city to build their own settlement and fort, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, known as Fort Mose. In return its Black militia guarded the northern approach to St. Augustine. Historians describe it as the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States.

Fort Mose had a leader as remarkable as the place. Francisco Menendez, who had escaped from slavery in the Carolinas, commanded its militia. In 1740 the British general James Oglethorpe captured the fort during his attack on St. Augustine, and Menendez led a surprise attack that took it back, though the battle destroyed it. Rebuilt in 1752, the community lasted until 1763, when Spain handed Florida to Britain and its people left for Cuba with the rest of St. Augustine's residents. Archaeologists located the site in 1986, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1994.

The core of it: The Stono rebels marched toward Spanish Florida, where Fort Mose, founded in 1738, offered a legal free Black community and a militia of people who had escaped British slavery.

Who the rebels were

The 1739 account calls the rebels "Angola Negroes." Modern historians have taken that label seriously. The historian Mark M. Smith, writing in the South Carolina Encyclopedia, notes that several of the rebels came from the heavily Catholic Kingdom of Kongo, that their faith may have shaped the timing of the uprising, and that they fought with Kongolese military training. That reading builds on John Thornton's 1991 study of the rebellion's African dimensions, and it fits what you learned in Lesson 3 about Kongo Christianity and in Lesson 5 about South Carolina's many captives from West Central Africa.

Smith adds other reasons for the timing: a yellow fever epidemic, rumors of war between Spain and Britain, a priest suspected of stirring revolt for Spain, and a new law, due to take effect on 29 September, requiring white men to carry guns to Sunday church services. The drums, the banner and the cry of "Liberty" look less like a riot and more like an army on the move.

The core of it: The Stono rebels likely included Catholic soldiers from Kongo, and they acted at a moment of epidemic, war rumors and new gun laws, which helps explain their discipline and their timing.

How it ended, and what it changed

Late in the afternoon the rebels halted in a field near the Edisto River, dancing, singing and drumming to draw more people to them. Planters and militiamen, raised by Lieutenant Governor William Bull after he escaped the rebels on the road, attacked. The rebels, even their enemies admitted, fought bravely, but they were defeated. Many were killed on the spot or after capture, and the heads of some were set on posts as a warning. About thirty escaped; some fought another battle a week later, and one leader was not captured until 1742.

The death toll shows why historians compare sources. The 1739 account reports "about 40 Negroes and 20 whites" killed. Smith estimates about forty whites and probably as many Black people died. The account also praises the planters for putting rebels to "an easy death" without torture, a claim that tells you about the writer's sympathies. Its author was a colonial official writing for a white audience, and we have no account written by the rebels themselves.

The colony answered with tighter control. The Negro Act of 1740 required a special act of the assembly to free any enslaved person, made every militiaman serve on patrols, and restricted the Sunday freedom to "work for themselves" that the rebels had used. In 1741 South Carolina imposed a heavy duty on importing captives, hoping to slow the growth of its Black majority.

Saint-Domingue, 1791: the revolution that made Haiti

Half a century later, a revolt on a far larger scale created a nation. In 1789 the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, held about 30,000 white residents, about as many free people of color, and roughly 465,000 enslaved people, perhaps as many as 500,000. Its plantations grew sugar and coffee for European markets, worked by people who had been carried there in the Atlantic trade.

In August 1791 the enslaved people of the northern plain rose. Planters in the region reported that more than two hundred sugar plantations and most of the province's coffee plantations had been destroyed. Over the next decade the revolution moved through war and diplomacy. In August 1793 the French commissioner Leger-Felicite Sonthonax proclaimed freedom in the north, and in 1794 France's revolutionary National Convention abolished slavery in its colonies. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who had become a general, then joined the French Republic and over seven years united the whole island under his command. He issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue with himself as governor for life.

Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruling France, sent an army under General Charles Leclerc in 1802 to restore French control. Toussaint was captured and deported to France, where he died as a prisoner in an Alpine fortress. But the forces of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Petion drove the French army out, and on 1 January 1804 Haiti declared its independence. It was the first nation in the Americas founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery.

The core of it: Between 1791 and 1804 the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue defeated their owners and Napoleon's army and founded Haiti, an independent nation born of a slave revolution.

Legacies of the Haitian Revolution

Haiti's independence frightened slaveholding nations and inspired enslaved and free Black people across the Americas, as Lesson 11 shows. The United States, itself a slaveholding republic, refused to recognize Haiti for decades. The State Department's Office of the Historian records that the United States recognized Haiti only on 12 July 1862, during the Civil War, under President Abraham Lincoln.

France exacted a price for its own recognition. Jean-Francois Briere, a historian of Haiti and France, explains that in 1825, under the threat of a naval blockade, Haiti was forced to agree to pay 150 million francs to compensate the former plantation owners. Haiti borrowed from French bankers to pay the first installment, so it owed two debts at once, the indemnity and the loans. A new treaty in 1838 lowered the indemnity to 90 million francs, and Haiti finished paying both debts in 1883. In other words, the people who had been enslaved paid their former owners for the loss of their property, themselves. Lesson 33 returns to how such histories enter today's debates over repair.

The core of it: Haiti's revolution inspired the enslaved and alarmed slaveholders; the United States withheld recognition until 1862, and France made Haiti pay an indemnity that took until 1883 to clear.

Common misconceptions

• Enslaved people in the colonies never rose in organized revolt. The Stono rebels marched under a banner with drums, and Saint-Domingue's revolution defeated a European army.
• People escaping slavery always fled north. Before 1763 many from the Carolinas fled south, because Spanish Florida offered legal freedom to those who converted, and Fort Mose was a free Black town.
• The Stono rebels were a disorganized mob. Historians point to Kongolese military training, a clear destination and a deliberate choice of timing.
• The French Revolution freed Haiti. Enslaved people rose first, in 1791; France abolished slavery in 1794 under pressure of their revolt, and Haiti won independence by defeating Napoleon's army.
• Haiti's independence ended its obligations to France. France demanded an indemnity in 1825, and Haiti paid until 1883.

The takeaway

• On 9 September 1739 about twenty "Angola" men led by Jemmy began the Stono Rebellion and marched south calling out "Liberty."
• They were heading for Spanish Florida, where Fort Mose, founded in 1738 under Francisco Menendez's militia, was a legal free Black town.
• Historians link the rebels to Catholic Kongo and its military training, and explain the timing through epidemic, war rumors and a new gun law.
• South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 tightened control over enslaved people and made freeing them harder.
• The Haitian Revolution began in August 1791 and, after Toussaint Louverture's capture, won independence under Dessalines and Petion on 1 January 1804.
• The United States recognized Haiti only in 1862, and France's 1825 indemnity burdened Haiti until 1883.

Sources

1. An account of the Negroe insurrection in South Carolina. (1739). In A. D. Candler (Ed.), The colonial records of the State of Georgia (Vol. 22, Pt. 2, pp. 232-236), 1913. Reprinted in National Humanities Center, Two views of the Stono slave rebellion (2009). nationalhumanitiescenter.org
2. Smith, M. M. (2016, updated 2022). Stono Rebellion. South Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies. scencyclopedia.org
3. Thornton, J. K. (1991). African dimensions of the Stono Rebellion. American Historical Review, 96(4), 1101-1113.
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Fort Mose. Fort Matanzas National Monument. nps.gov
5. John Carter Brown Library. (n.d.). The other revolution: Haiti, 1789-1804 [Digital catalogue; M. Ghachem, guest curator]. jcblibrary.org
6. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). Haiti [A guide to the United States' history of recognition]. history.state.gov
7. Briere, J.-F. (n.d.). The double debt. Haiti: An Island Luminous, Digital Library of the Caribbean and Florida International University. islandluminous.fiu.edu

A storm on 30 August 1800

Toward sundown on 30 August 1800, a massive storm of wind and rain broke over the country north of Richmond, Virginia. It flooded roads and streams on the very night that hundreds of enslaved men were supposed to gather there and march on the state capital. The plan had been organized in the neighborhood of Brook, north of the city, by several enslaved men, among them a blacksmith named Gabriel, owned by Thomas Henry Prosser. According to Encyclopedia Virginia's account of the trial testimony, one party was to set fire to the wooden buildings of lower Richmond while the main column seized the state's weapons at the Capitol and the penitentiary and captured Governor James Monroe. Blacksmiths had refashioned scythe blades into swords.

The storm forced the leaders to postpone for a night. But that morning two enslaved men, Pharoah and Tom, had already told a white man, Mosby Sheppard, about the plot, and Monroe had sent out patrols. The conspiracy collapsed. Seventy-two men were tried; twenty-six were hanged, eight were transported out of the state, and thirteen were pardoned. Gabriel escaped on a schooner to Norfolk, where an enslaved crewman turned him in. He was hanged in Richmond on 10 October 1800.

Gabriel's plan raises the question at the center of this lesson. Most of what we know about such plots comes from the courts that crushed them, from testimony given by frightened prisoners to judges who meant to hang them. How do historians decide what really happened? This lesson works through that problem with one famous case, and then turns to people who resisted by escaping and building free communities of their own.

What the Gabriel records show

The trial records show a plot shaped by its moment. Virginia's slaveholders had been anxious since refugees from the revolution in Saint-Domingue began arriving in 1793. Recruiters for the plot spread rumors that a French army had landed in Virginia, and some recruits were told that Quakers, Methodists and Frenchmen, people they saw as friends of freedom, would be spared. Encyclopedia Virginia also notes a problem with the evidence: to hang a man, the state had only to prove that he had joined the conspiracy. So witnesses testified mostly about recruiting, and recruiters often exaggerated their numbers, claiming 500, 5,000 or even 10,000 men.

So what?: Gabriel's plan was real and carefully organized, but the records that describe it were produced to convict, so historians read them for what they can and cannot prove.

1811: the largest revolt

The largest slave revolt in United States history began on the evening of 8 January 1811, on the sugar plantations of the German Coast along the Mississippi River above New Orleans. The historian Robert L. Paquette, writing for the Louisiana encyclopedia 64 Parishes, describes how enslaved people attacked the planter Manuel Andry, then marched toward New Orleans, about thirty miles away, with drums, flags and weapons. Eyewitness estimates of their numbers ranged from 150 to 500. On 10 January militia and federal troops, the first used against a slave revolt in the nation's history, defeated them. The alleged leader, an enslaved man named Charles Deslondes, was killed, and close to one hundred enslaved men and women died in combat or by execution, making it the deadliest slave rebellion in United States history.

The dispute: was there a Vesey conspiracy?

Now the hardest case. Denmark Vesey was born into slavery around 1767, probably on the Danish island of St. Thomas, and was brought to Charleston, South Carolina, by a slave-trading captain. In 1799 he won $1,500 in a city lottery and bought his freedom for $600. He became a carpenter and a lay preacher in Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal church, which city authorities shut down repeatedly. In the summer of 1822 the city's courts concluded that Vesey had organized a plan for enslaved people to rise on 14 July, kill their owners, fight their way to the city's docks and escape to Haiti. The courts arrested 131 people. Thirty-five, Vesey among them, were hanged, and thirty-seven were transported out of the state. The city razed the African church.

Historians have argued about this case for sixty years. Here are the two positions, each with its evidence.

The plot was real. Douglas R. Egerton, author of a biography of Vesey and of the South Carolina Encyclopedia's entry on him, treats the conspiracy as an ambitious plan for a mass exodus of families to Haiti, the free Black republic. His account draws on the trial testimony to describe Vesey's grievances, including the continued enslavement of his wife Beck and their children, the recruiters who spread the plan, and the blacksmiths who forged weapons. In 2004 Egerton and Robert L. Paquette defended that reading in an article titled "Of Facts and Fables." On this view, Vesey was a revolutionary whose plan was betrayed in May 1822 by enslaved men who told their owners.

The plot was largely invented by the court. As early as 1964 the historian Richard Wade argued that the court's Official Report could not be trusted and that no conspiracy in fact existed. In 2001 Michael P. Johnson revived that argument in the William and Mary Quarterly, raising serious questions about the trial records on which recent books relied. Much of the testimony was secondhand, some came from prisoners who had been tortured, and some white Charlestonians at the time doubted the plot existed. For Johnson, the real heroes of the episode were the defendants who refused to give false testimony against others.

What would settle it? Evidence from outside the courtroom: letters, diaries or records made by people who were not trying to convict anyone, and careful comparison of the court's handwritten notes with the report it later published. Until such evidence closes the question, a careful student says what the court claimed, who doubted it and why, and what the dispute itself reveals about how slave societies produced their evidence.

So what?: The Vesey debate shows that records made by courts determined to convict are powerful but compromised sources, and that historians must weigh them against the conditions that produced them.

1831: Nat Turner and a contested confession

On the night of Sunday, 21 August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner and a small band of enslaved men began a revolt that lasted about two days. Turner was literate and deeply religious, and he had seen a solar eclipse that February as a sign to act. His four first confederates, Henry, Hark, Nelson and Sam, never betrayed the plan. By the account later published, the rebels killed fifty-five white men, women and children. Afterward white people killed about three dozen Black people without trial in the county, and nineteen people were executed by the courts. Turner hid for two months, was captured on 30 October, and was hanged on 11 November 1831.

Almost everything known about Turner's own thinking comes from The Confessions of Nat Turner, a pamphlet produced by Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer who interviewed him in jail over three days and registered the copyright before the execution. Gray had his own purposes, so readers must separate Turner's voice from Gray's framing. One exchange is often quoted:

Ques. Do you not find yourself mistaken now? Ans. Was not Christ crucified.

Virginia's lawmakers then debated petitions on slavery in the winter of 1831 and 1832. A committee reported that it was "inexpedient" to pass any law ending slavery, and the legislature instead passed restrictions aimed at Black religion and at the rights of free Black Virginians.

So what?: Turner's revolt led not to emancipation but to harsher laws, and our main source for his words was shaped by the white lawyer who published it.

Running to freedom: maroon communities

Not every act of resistance was a revolt. Enslaved people slowed their work, broke tools, ran away for days or weeks, as Turner himself once did, and sometimes left for good. When people who escaped slavery built lasting free communities in remote places, scholars call it marronage, and the people maroons.

In the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service records that freedom seekers created free settlements on isolated islands deep in the swamp from the late 1600s through the Civil War. The Service estimates that some 50,000 self-emancipated people lived there over time. The swamp's refuge is now part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

In Jamaica, maroons won more. In the Blue and John Crow Mountains, UNESCO explains, the Windward Maroons built a network of trails, hiding places and settlements, now called the Nanny Town Heritage Route after their leader Nanny, and used their knowledge of the forest to achieve autonomy and recognition from the colonial government. Their religious rites, medicine and dances survive today, and UNESCO now lists the mountains as a World Heritage site. Lesson 12 visits the most famous maroon community of all, Palmares in Brazil.

So what?: Maroon communities, from the Great Dismal Swamp to Jamaica's mountains, show resistance as building a free life, not only as fighting.

Common misconceptions

• Slave revolts in the United States were rare and small. Plots and risings from Gabriel's in 1800 to the German Coast in 1811, with up to 500 rebels, and Turner's in 1831 shook the South.
• Court records tell us exactly what happened. They were made to convict, often from coerced or secondhand testimony, which is why the Vesey case is still debated.
• The Confessions of Nat Turner are simply Turner's own words. They were taken down and published by Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer with his own purposes.
• Revolts pushed slaveholding states toward ending slavery. Virginia's legislature declined to end slavery after 1831 and passed harsher laws instead.
• Resistance meant only armed rebellion. Work slowdowns, flight and maroon communities were far more common forms of resistance.

Recap

• Gabriel's 1800 plan to seize Richmond was betrayed and washed out by a storm; twenty-six men, Gabriel among them, were hanged.
• The 1811 German Coast uprising near New Orleans, with up to 500 rebels, was the largest and deadliest slave revolt in United States history.
• Historians still dispute whether Denmark Vesey's 1822 conspiracy was real: Egerton and Paquette argue it was, while Wade and Johnson argue the court largely created it.
• Nat Turner's 1831 revolt killed fifty-five white people and led to the killing of many Black people and to harsher Virginia laws; Gray's Confessions must be read for his framing.
• Maroons built free communities in places such as the Great Dismal Swamp and Jamaica's Blue and John Crow Mountains.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia Virginia. (n.d.). Gabriel's Rebellion (1800). Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
2. Paquette, R. L. (n.d.). German Coast slave insurrection of 1811. 64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. 64parishes.org
3. Egerton, D. R. (2016, updated 2022). Vesey, Denmark. South Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina. scencyclopedia.org
4. von Daacke, K. (n.d.). Denmark Vesey. Teachinghistory.org, National History Education Clearinghouse. teachinghistory.org
5. Johnson, M. P. (2001). Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators. William and Mary Quarterly, 58(4), 915-976.
6. Paquette, R. L., and Egerton, D. R. (2004). Of facts and fables: New light on the Denmark Vesey affair. South Carolina Historical Magazine, 105(1), 8-48.
7. Encyclopedia Virginia. (n.d.). Nat Turner's Revolt (1831). Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
8. Gray, T. R. (1831). The confessions of Nat Turner. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina. docsouth.unc.edu
9. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (n.d.). About us: Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. fws.gov
10. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Blue and John Crow Mountains. whc.unesco.org

The last law, 13 May 1888

On 13 May 1888, Princess Isabel, ruling Brazil as regent for her father, Emperor Pedro II, signed a law of two short articles. Its first article read: "E declarada extincta, desde a data desta Lei, a escravidao no Brazil." Slavery in Brazil is declared extinct from the date of this law. The second article repealed every law to the contrary. With that, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, twenty-three years after the United States.

Brazil matters to African American studies because it was the largest destination of the whole Atlantic trade. Lesson 1 showed that it received about 4.86 million of the Africans who survived the crossing, more than twelve times as many as mainland North America. Yet its slave society ended differently. This lesson compares the two systems side by side. Then it turns to a story often left out of both: the African Americans who lived, enslaved and free, inside the Indigenous nations of the American South.

Two slave societies compared

Reading the table

Start with the puzzle in the first and fourth rows. Brazil imported more than twelve times as many captives as mainland North America. Yet when each country counted its enslaved people for the last time under slavery, Brazil had about 1.5 million and the United States almost 4 million. Two other rows hold much of the explanation. Brazil kept importing captives until about 1850, while the United States, as Lesson 7 showed, grew its enslaved population by births after 1808. And far more Afro-Brazilians were free. In 1872, 58 percent of Brazil's people were counted as Black or of mixed descent, while only 15 percent were enslaved. In the United States in 1860, by contrast, nearly nine in ten Black Americans were enslaved.

The laws also differ. Brazil's 1871 law of the free womb declared that children born to enslaved women from that day would be free. Read the details, though. The mother's owner raised the child to age eight. Then the owner could either hand the child to the government for compensation or keep using the child's labor until age 21. Freedom arrived gradually and on terms set to protect owners. The United States never passed such a law; slavery there ended all at once, through a civil war.

Key idea: Brazil received far more captives than the United States and kept importing them until 1850, but by 1872 most Afro-Brazilians were free, while in 1860 most Black Americans were enslaved.

Valongo: a wharf of arrivals

In the old harbor district of Rio de Janeiro, archaeologists have uncovered the stone paving of the Valongo Wharf, built from 1811 for landing enslaved Africans. UNESCO, which made it a World Heritage site, estimates that up to 900,000 African captives entered the Americas there. It calls Valongo the most important physical trace of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the American continent and a site of conscience, a place that keeps the memory of a crime against humanity. Lesson 32 asks how other countries mark such places.

Palmares and Zumbi

Brazil's most famous maroon community, called a quilombo, grew in the seventeenth century in the hills of Serra da Barriga, in today's state of Alagoas. According to the cultural foundation of the city of Salvador, its last leader, Zumbi, was born there in 1655, born free but enslaved as a child and baptized by a Portuguese missionary. In 1670 he escaped back to Palmares. When the Portuguese crown offered terms in 1678 that required the community to give up people who had escaped slavery, Zumbi rejected them and became Palmares's leader. Palmares resisted attacks for more than fifteen years before troops commanded by Domingos Jorge Velho overran it in 1694. Zumbi escaped, but was betrayed, captured and killed on 20 November 1695.

That date is now Brazil's Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, a national holiday by a law of 2023. The choice says something about memory. Brazil officially remembers its abolition with the date of a princess's signature, 13 May, and its Black movement chose instead to honor a man who fought slavery and died free.

Key idea: Valongo marks the arrival of hundreds of thousands of captives, and Palmares, led to its end by Zumbi in 1695, made resistance the center of Afro-Brazilian memory.

Into the Indigenous nations

Closer to home, the story of slavery ran through Indigenous nations too. The historian Linda W. Reese, in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, explains that members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations, often called the Five Tribes, held African Americans in slavery. When the United States forced these nations from the Southeast to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, in the 1830s, the enslaved people they held were forced west with them. By 1861 the tribes' members held about ten thousand people in slavery.

Slavery differed from nation to nation. Reese notes that Creeks and Seminoles often intermarried with the people they enslaved and allowed a broad range of freedoms. The Cherokee resisted intermarriage, and the Choctaw and Chickasaw came closest to the cotton plantation system of white slaveholders. Enslaved people adapted to Indian ways of dress, food, language and shared landholding, and some people who escaped slavery elsewhere fled into Indian Territory believing it less bound by race.

The Civil War split the nations. The Cherokee national government freed its slaves in June 1863. After the war, the United States made new treaties in 1866 that required the nations to end slavery and to take in their Freedmen, the formerly enslaved, as citizens. The Seminole agreed at once, in March 1866, and the Cherokee amended their constitution that November. The Choctaw granted citizenship only in 1883, and the Chickasaw never did.

The Black Seminoles and John Horse

In Florida, Black people who had escaped slavery joined or allied with the Seminole people, and their descendants are known as Black Seminoles. John Horse, born in Florida around 1812 of African, Indian and Spanish descent and born into slavery, fought as a sub-chief in the Second Seminole War. Removed to Indian Territory, the Black Seminoles found themselves under the authority of the slaveholding Creeks and in constant danger of being seized. In the autumn of 1849 John Horse and the Seminole leader Coacoochee, known as Wild Cat, led about a hundred followers to Mexico, where they settled in Coahuila and served as border guards. John Horse died in Mexico in 1882, still working to secure land for his people.

A treaty enforced in 2021

The promise of the 1866 treaties was argued over for a century and a half. In 2017 a federal court ruled, in Cherokee Nation v. Nash, that Cherokee Freedmen descendants hold full rights as Cherokee citizens under the Treaty of 1866. On 22 February 2021 the Cherokee Nation's own Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the words "by blood," used to limit citizenship, were void and must be removed from the Nation's constitution and laws. The Nation's attorney general, Sara Hill, had asked the court to act, arguing that denying Freedmen descendants full citizenship violated the Nation's treaty obligations.

Key idea: African Americans lived enslaved and free within the Five Tribes, and the citizenship their descendants won in the 1866 treaties was fully confirmed by courts only in 2017 and 2021.

Common misconceptions

• Most enslaved Africans went to the United States. Brazil alone received about 4.86 million of the survivors of the crossing, against about 389,000 for mainland North America.
• Slavery ended everywhere in the Americas by the 1860s. Brazil abolished it only on 13 May 1888.
• Brazil's slavery was mild, so race did not matter there. Its trade was the largest of all and lasted to 1850, and freedom came gradually on owners' terms; a larger free population of color did not mean equality.
• Indigenous nations stood wholly outside the history of slavery. Members of the Five Tribes held about ten thousand African Americans in slavery by 1861, and their Freedmen's citizenship was contested into the 2020s.
• A free womb law freed children immediately. Brazil's 1871 law let owners keep using the labor of the free-born children until age 21.

Where this leaves us

• Brazil's Golden Law of 13 May 1888 ended slavery there, last in the Americas.
• Brazil received over twelve times as many captives as mainland North America, imported them until 1850, and by 1872 most Afro-Brazilians were free; most Black Americans in 1860 were enslaved.
• Valongo Wharf in Rio received up to 900,000 captives and is now a UNESCO site of conscience.
• Palmares resisted for decades under Zumbi, killed on 20 November 1695, now Brazil's Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness.
• The Five Tribes held about ten thousand African Americans in slavery by 1861; the 1866 treaties promised Freedmen citizenship, which the Cherokee Nation's courts confirmed in 2021.
• Black Seminoles led by John Horse fought removal and found a refuge in Mexico.

Sources

1. Brazil. (1888). Lei no 3.353, de 13 de maio de 1888 [The Golden Law]. Presidencia da Republica, Planalto. planalto.gov.br
2. Brazil. (1871). Lei no 2.040, de 28 de setembro de 1871 [The law of the free womb]. Presidencia da Republica, Planalto. planalto.gov.br
3. Poder360. (2022, August 6). Censo de 1872 registrou 1,5 milhao de escravos no Brasil. poder360.com.br
4. SlaveVoyages Consortium. (n.d.). Estimates: Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 1501-1866 [Disembarkations by region and period]. slavevoyages.org
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Valongo Wharf archaeological site. whc.unesco.org
6. Fundacao Gregorio de Mattos. (2025). Zumbi dos Palmares [Monument description, in Portuguese, Spanish and English]. City of Salvador. fgm.salvador.ba.gov.br
7. Brazil. (2023). Lei no 14.759 [Declares 20 November, the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, a national holiday]. Planalto. planalto.gov.br
8. Reese, L. W. (2010, updated 2024). Freedmen. The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society. okhistory.org
9. Seminole Nation Museum. (n.d.). John Horse. seminolenationmuseum.org
10. Cherokee Nation. (2021, February 22). Cherokee Nation Supreme Court issues decision that 'by blood' reference be stricken from Cherokee Nation Constitution [News release]. Cherokee One Feather. theonefeather.com

A newspaper of their own, 16 March 1827

On 16 March 1827, a new weekly newspaper appeared in New York City. Its editors, Samuel E. Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, explained on the front page why it existed:

We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.

Freedom's Journal was the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans. It appeared in the same year that New York finally ended slavery. Until then, Black people rarely appeared in American newspapers unless they were accused of a crime. Now readers found news of Haiti and Sierra Leone, articles on schools and jobs, and the births, weddings and deaths of their neighbors. The paper soon circulated in eleven states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Canada and Europe.

That front-page sentence could stand over this whole lesson. In the decades before the Civil War, free Black northerners built their own churches, newspapers, conventions and schools. They used them to argue with slaveholders and with white reformers. They also argued with one another: about whether the enslaved should resist by force, about who could speak in public, and about whether to stay in the United States at all.

Institutions of their own

Lesson 9 met the Free African Society that Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded in Philadelphia in 1787. Allen, who had bought his own freedom in 1783, went on to lead Bethel Church, dedicated in July 1794. In 1816 Bethel joined other Black Methodist congregations to form a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and Allen was elected its first bishop.

Bethel also hosted the first national Colored Convention. From 20 to 24 September 1830, forty delegates met there and elected the seventy-year-old Allen as their president. Events in Ohio made the meeting urgent. In 1829 white mobs attacked Black residents of Cincinnati, and the historian Carter G. Woodson later wrote that "bands of ruffians held sway in the city for three days." He estimated that a thousand or twelve hundred Black Cincinnatians left for Canada, where the Wilberforce settlement grew out of the crisis. The 1830 meeting was the first of a series of national conventions over the next quarter century. There Black northerners debated strategy in public, wrote addresses and resolutions, and decided who would speak for them.

Schools were a second battlefield. In Boston, Black residents, among them Prince Hall, petitioned the state legislature for access to public schools in 1787. In 1798 Black parents organized their own African School. The city opened the Abiel Smith School for Black children in 1835, but its conditions were worse than those of the white schools. In the 1840s William Cooper Nell, once a pupil of the African School, led an Equal Schools movement of petitions, protests and a boycott. In 1849 Benjamin Roberts sued so that his daughter Sarah could attend the school nearest their home. He lost. Then, in 1855, the Massachusetts legislature outlawed segregation in public schools. Nell recalled a young Black student walking past the old school on the first day:

Good bye forever colored school! Tomorrow we are like the other Boston boys.

The point: Free Black northerners did not wait to be spoken for. They built a church, a press, a national convention movement and a campaign for equal schools, and used them to plead their own cause.

Radical resistance: Walker and Garnet

David Walker grew up free in Wilmington, North Carolina, the son of a free mother and an enslaved father. By 1825 he had settled in Boston, where he ran a used clothing store on Brattle Street. He was a principal agent for Freedom's Journal and served in the Massachusetts General Colored Association, considered the first Black abolitionist organization. In September 1829 he published his Appeal, in Four Articles, addressed "to the Coloured Citizens of the World." Thinking of the families driven out of Ohio, he told readers to stand their ground:

Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites--we have enriched it with our blood and tears.

Walker went further. He asked enslaved readers: "had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and dear little children?" Sailors carried copies of the Appeal into the South. The mayor of Savannah asked the mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, to act against Walker. Otis found the pamphlet "extremely bad and inflammatory" but said he could do nothing about it. In 1830 North Carolina's legislators had the Appeal in mind as they tightened the state's laws on enslaved and free Black people. Walker died in Boston on 6 August 1830. Official records gave the cause as consumption, though some suspected murder.

Fourteen years later, Henry Highland Garnet, who had been born enslaved, carried Walker's challenge to the national convention in Buffalo, New York. His Address to the Slaves of the United States of America spoke directly to the enslaved. In the version Garnet printed in 1848, he called armed revolution "INEXPEDIENT," since the enslaved were outnumbered. Instead he urged them to stop working for owners who would not pay them. His closing lines became famous:

Let your motto be RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!--No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.

Frederick Douglass, then a follower of William Lloyd Garrison's moral suasion, a nonviolent strategy of persuading the nation to give up slavery, spoke against the address. The convention rejected it by only one vote. Garnet's preface records the objections. Opponents called the address "war-like," and said that delegates living near the slave states "would not dare to return to their homes." Notice what the preface tells a historian. Garnet says the 1848 text was "slightly modified," so the words we read are not exactly the words delegates heard in 1843.

The point: Walker and Garnet argued that the enslaved had a right to resist and that free Black people must claim America as their own; many abolitionists, Douglass among them in 1843, still hoped persuasion would end slavery.

Women claim the platform

Black women organized too, and they had to defend their right to speak at all. Maria W. Stewart was born free in Hartford, Connecticut. On 21 September 1832 she lectured at Franklin Hall in Boston, where the New England Anti-Slavery Society held its monthly meetings. She was one of the first African American women to speak in public about slavery and racism. She told her audience of a question she had heard in prayer:

Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman?

Stewart spoke about work as well as slavery. She had asked several women who ran their own businesses whether they would hire Black girls who brought good references. They said they had no objection, but that hiring them was not the custom and would cost them customers. "And such is the powerful force of prejudice," Stewart said. She also claimed her place in the nation in plain words: "I am a true born American; your blood flows in my veins, and your spirit fires my breast."

Sojourner Truth carried the cause onto the women's rights platform. She was born into slavery in New York in 1797 and named Isabella Baumfree. In 1827, after her enslaver broke his promise to free her, she left. "I did not run away," she later said, "I walked away by daylight." She renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 and became a traveling preacher, abolitionist and women's rights speaker. On 29 May 1851 she spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech is famous as "Ain't I a Woman?" Yet there are two main versions of it, and they differ a great deal.

The historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of a 1996 biography of Truth, was the scholar who first showed how far Gage's version strayed from the original. Robinson's report is the closer record. In it you hear a woman claiming equal rights through her own labor:

I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?

The point: Stewart and Truth claimed a public voice for Black women on both race and sex, and Truth's speech shows why historians compare versions before trusting a famous text.

Stay or go? The debate over belonging

The sharpest argument was about belonging. In 1816 a group of white Americans founded the American Colonization Society. According to the State Department's Office of the Historian, they saw the growing number of free Black people as a "problem" and planned to resettle them in Africa. The Society's members ranged from abolitionists to slaveholders. In 1820 it sent 88 free Black settlers to West Africa, and in 1824 its colony was named Liberia. Even William Lloyd Garrison, who began his Boston paper the Liberator in 1831, had backed the Society in 1829. He turned against colonization after contact with Black Americans.

Most free Black northerners rejected the plan. In 1817 a gathering of Black Philadelphians at Bethel denounced colonization as an insult, a forced removal disguised as voluntary emigration. A decade later, Richard Allen explained his own view in a letter to Freedom's Journal, which Walker reprinted:

This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.

Not everyone agreed. After Cornish left Freedom's Journal in September 1827, Russwurm began to promote colonization. Most readers opposed the shift, and the paper closed in March 1829. Russwurm emigrated to Liberia, where he became governor of the Maryland colony.

By the 1850s the debate had changed shape. Some leaders now argued for emigration that Black people would choose and lead themselves. Martin R. Delany had co-edited Douglass's paper, the North Star, from 1847, then entered Harvard's medical school, which dismissed him because of his race. In 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States:

We are a nation within a nation;--as the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch in the British dominions.

Delany did not mean Liberia. He called the colonization society "one of the most arrant enemies of the colored man" and dismissed Liberia as a dependency of the society's board in Washington. "But we must go from among our oppressors," he wrote, to the place where "our manhood can be best developed; and that is Central and South America, and the West Indies." In August 1854 he led the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland. Its 106 delegates, more than twenty of them women, met in the Congregational Church on Prospect Street. The call invited only the "friends of emigration," and the convention refused to let the Clevelander John Malvin speak against it.

Mary Ann Shadd, born free in Delaware in 1823, chose a third direction. After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she moved to Canada. Her 1852 pamphlet, A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West, urged Black Americans to follow. On 25 March 1854 she published the first issue of the Provincial Freeman, becoming one of the first Black women in North America to edit a newspaper, though she kept her name off the masthead.

Frederick Douglass answered them all. In the North Star of 16 November 1849 he had written:

We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous.

Douglass argued that Black workers were too essential to the country to be driven out, and that removing millions of people would cost more than all the gold of California. "We shall neither die out, nor be driven out," he wrote. The Cleveland call drew harsh criticism, particularly from Douglass. Still, the debate was never simply a duel between two men. Garnet, who had demanded resistance in 1843, began to favor emigration by 1849.

The point: Colonization was a plan made for Black Americans by a white-led society, and most free Black northerners rejected it; emigrationists like Delany and Shadd wanted a move that Black people would choose and lead, while Douglass answered, "We are here."

Common misconceptions

• Abolition was a white movement that spoke for Black people. Black northerners founded their own newspaper in 1827, a national convention in 1830 and an abolitionist association in Boston, and Garrison turned against colonization after contact with Black Americans.
• The North offered equality. Boston's public schools stayed segregated until 1855, and mobs in Cincinnati drove a thousand or more Black residents to Canada in 1829.
• Emigration and colonization were the same thing. Colonization was a white-led society's plan for Liberia. Delany and Shadd argued for emigration that Black people would choose and lead, and Delany scorned the colonization society.
• "Ain't I a Woman?" is a word-for-word record. The refrain comes from Frances Gage's version of 1863; the report printed weeks after the speech does not contain it.
• Black leaders spoke with one voice. They disagreed sharply about armed resistance and about whether to leave the country, and some, like Russwurm and Garnet, changed their minds.

Putting it together

• Freedom's Journal, founded on 16 March 1827 by Samuel E. Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, announced: "We wish to plead our own cause."
• Free Black northerners built the AME Church (1816), the Colored Convention movement (from 1830) and an Equal Schools campaign that ended Boston's school segregation in 1855.
• David Walker's Appeal (1829) and Henry Highland Garnet's Address (1843) called for resistance; the convention rejected Garnet's address by one vote after Douglass spoke against it.
• Maria W. Stewart lectured in public in 1832, and Sojourner Truth spoke at Akron in 1851; the refrain "Ain't I a woman?" comes from Gage's 1863 version.
• Most Black northerners rejected the white-led American Colonization Society; Delany and Shadd argued for Black-led emigration, and Douglass answered, "We are here, and here we are likely to be."

Sources

1. Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. (n.d.). Freedom's Journal: "We wish to plead our own cause" [Lesson]. Mapping the African American Past. maap.columbia.edu
2. PBS. (1998). Freedom's Journal. The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords. pbs.org
3. Howell, R. (2009). Mother Bethel AME Church (congregation and community). The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. philadelphiaencyclopedia.org
4. Colored Conventions Project. (n.d.). The convention event and Emergency in Cincinnati. In The Meeting that Launched a Movement: The First National Convention. coloredconventions.org; coloredconventions.org
5. National Park Service. (n.d.). Abiel Smith School. Boston African American National Historic Site. nps.gov
6. Walker, D. (1830). Walker's appeal, in four articles; together with a preamble, to the coloured citizens of the world (3rd ed.). David Walker. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina. docsouth.unc.edu
7. National Park Service. (n.d.). David Walker. nps.gov
8. Garnet, H. H. (1848). An address to the slaves of the United States of America. In Walker's appeal, with a brief sketch of his life, and also Garnet's address to the slaves of the United States of America. J. H. Tobitt. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
9. PBS. (1998). Henry Highland Garnet. Africans in America. pbs.org
10. Stewart, M. W. (1835). Lecture delivered at Franklin Hall [21 September 1832]. In Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. Friends of Freedom and Virtue. Teaching American History. teachingamericanhistory.org
11. National Park Service. (2017). Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a woman? Women's Rights National Historical Park. nps.gov
12. Podell, L. (n.d.). Compare the two speeches. The Sojourner Truth Project. thesojournertruthproject.com
13. Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. W. W. Norton.
14. Office of the Historian. (n.d.). Founding of Liberia, 1847. U.S. Department of State. history.state.gov
15. Saillant, J. (2015). Colonization movement (Africa). The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. philadelphiaencyclopedia.org
16. National Park Service. (n.d.). William Lloyd Garrison. nps.gov
17. Delany, M. R. (1852). The condition, elevation, emigration, and destiny of the colored people of the United States. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
18. Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. (n.d.). National Emigration Convention of Colored People. Case Western Reserve University. case.edu
19. Colored Conventions Project. (2016). Mary Ann Shadd and Delany v. Douglass. In To Stay or To Go? The 1854 National Emigration Convention. coloredconventions.org; coloredconventions.org
20. Douglass, F. (1849, November 16). The destiny of colored Americans. The North Star. Teaching American History. teachingamericanhistory.org

A title page without a name, 1861

Picture the title page of a small book printed in Boston for 1861. It reads: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Below come two quotations, one from the prophet Isaiah and one signed only "A Woman of North Carolina." Then: "Edited by L. Maria Child. Boston: Published for the Author." Nowhere on the page, or anywhere in the book, does the author give her real name. The preface is signed "Linda Brent," and it begins:

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true.

For more than a century, many readers did not believe her. Some treated the book as a novel. Others assumed that its white editor, Lydia Maria Child, had really written it. The archival research of the scholar Jean Fagan Yellin settled the question. Her 1987 edition printed letters showing that Harriet Jacobs wrote the book and that Child's editing was minor. The doubts about Jacobs, and the evidence that answered them, show why historians read every narrative with a method. This lesson teaches that method and uses it on two famous narratives. Then it applies the same questions to the Underground Railroad and to photographs.

Five questions for any narrative

A slave narrative is a first-person account of life in slavery and escape from it. Narratives were evidence and arguments at the same time. To use one as a historian, ask five questions:

1. Who wrote it, and who vouched for it? Read the title page and any prefaces or letters printed with the text.
2. When, where and for whom was it published? Most narratives were printed in the North for readers the author hoped to win over.
3. What does the author say the purpose is? Prefaces often state it plainly.
4. What is hidden or changed, and why? Authors still at risk often disguised names, places and methods.
5. What can be checked? Compare the text with other evidence, such as records, newspapers, letters and later accounts.

Step by step: Douglass's Narrative, 1845

Who wrote it, and who vouched for it? The title page announces Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Before Douglass's first word come a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter from the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Their names helped persuade Northern readers to trust a Black author. Phillips recalled an old fable in which a lion complains about how men tell stories of lions. Now, he wrote, "I am glad the time has come when the 'lions write history.'"

When, where and for whom? The book was published in 1845 "at the Anti-Slavery Office, No. 25 Cornhill," in Boston. According to the National Park Service, some of Douglass's audiences suspected that such a gifted speaker had never been enslaved, and he wrote the book to lay those doubts to rest. So he named real people and real places. That was dangerous. Douglass was not yet legally free, and to avoid capture he spent almost two years speaking in England, Ireland and Scotland, until abolitionists bought his freedom.

What is hidden, and why? When his story reached his escape, Douglass stopped and told readers what he would not tell them:

I deem it proper to make known my intention not to state all the facts connected with the transaction.

He gave two reasons. Details could bring "the most embarrassing difficulties" on people who had helped him, and they would make slaveholders more watchful. He even criticized abolitionists in the West who talked openly about their "underground railroad," which, he said, they had turned into an "upperground railroad." He wanted to "keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave."

What can be checked? In 1881, with slavery abolished, Douglass finally told the story in his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. On 3 September 1838 he boarded a northbound train in Baltimore dressed as a sailor, in a red shirt and a tarpaulin hat. He carried a sailor's protection, a paper certifying a free American sailor, borrowed from a sailor friend. It described a man "much darker than myself," so Douglass jumped aboard as the train was moving to avoid a close inspection at the station. He crossed the Susquehanna at Havre de Grace, changed to a steamboat at Wilmington and reached New York in less than a day.

The National Park Service adds a fact the 1845 text did not state: Anna Murray, a young free Black woman who soon became his wife, used her own money to buy his train ticket. In New York, David Ruggles, the secretary of the city's vigilance committee, hid him for several days.

Remember: Douglass named names to prove he had been enslaved but hid how he escaped to protect others; his 1881 account and later research show that free Black people, Anna Murray first among them, made his escape possible.

Step by step: Jacobs's Incidents, 1861

Who wrote it, and who vouched for it? Incidents also says "Written by Herself," and its voucher is its editor. Lydia Maria Child, a well-known white antislavery writer, explained exactly what she had done:

At her request, I have revised her manuscript; but such changes as I have made have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement. I have not added any thing to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks.

Child's letters, printed in Yellin's edition, show that this statement was true.

When, where and for whom? Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. She escaped to the North in 1842 and lived for ten years as a fugitive, until her employer, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, bought her freedom in 1852. Her first publisher went bankrupt, so a Boston printer brought the book out late in 1860, "Published for the Author." A London edition followed in 1861. In her preface Jacobs named her readers. She wrote "to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse."

What is hidden, and why? "I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names," Jacobs wrote. Her enslaver, Dr. James Norcom, became "Dr. Flint," and she became "Linda Brent." Jacobs said she did this out of kindness to others. William L. Andrews, a leading scholar of slave narratives, adds that she also had to shield herself from readers whose sympathy she could not take for granted. She was writing about a subject earlier narratives by men had mentioned but never faced so directly: the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Norcom sexually harassed her from the time she was barely a teenager. Jacobs explained why her story could not be told the way men told theirs:

Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.

Jacobs also explained her own choices. To escape Norcom's control, she entered a relationship with another white man, a lawyer named Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and had two children with him. Andrews notes that she presented herself as an agent making deliberate choices rather than as a victim. She asked readers to judge accordingly: "I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others."

Her resistance took an extraordinary form. In the summer of 1835 she hid in a crawl space above a storeroom in the house of her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a free Black woman. Jacobs described it:

The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air.

She stayed there for nearly seven years. She sewed, read the Bible and watched her children through a small opening. She wrote letters to Norcom designed to confuse him about where she was. In 1842 she finally left for the North by boat.

What can be checked? On 4 July 1835, the American Beacon of Norfolk, Virginia, carried a notice signed by Norcom himself:

$100 REWARD Will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl HARRIET. ... As this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North.

The notice matches the book point after point: the real man behind "Dr. Flint," the year 1835, her skill as a seamstress, which the notice also mentions, and Norcom's belief that she had gone north, the very belief her letters tried to create. Read against the book, the phrase "without any known cause or provocation" becomes evidence about the man who wrote it.

Jacobs was not the only woman to escape by her wits. In 1848 Ellen Craft disguised herself as a male slaveholder, with her husband William playing the part of her enslaved servant, and the couple traveled from Georgia to Philadelphia.

Remember: Jacobs hid names but not the truth. Her editor's letters and her enslaver's own notice confirm her account, and her book put enslaved women's sexual exploitation, and their resistance to it, into the record.

The Underground Railroad: records and legends

The phrase "Underground Railroad" makes people imagine tunnels and secret trains. The National Park Service defines it differently: the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage. Many freedom seekers began their journeys alone, and many finished them without help. Over the decades more people helped, among them free and enslaved Black people, American Indians and people of many backgrounds. Freedom seekers went to Canada, Mexico, Spanish Florida, Indian Territory, the West, the Caribbean and Europe. The Park Service calls "freedom seeker" a more accurate term than "fugitive" or "runaway."

Help became more organized after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which put federal power behind enslavers. Section 6 silenced the accused:

In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.

Anyone who helped a freedom seeker could be fined up to a thousand dollars and jailed for six months. The commissioners who decided cases were paid ten dollars when they sent a person south and five dollars when they did not.

In Philadelphia, William Still kept the most important records. He was born in New Jersey in 1821, the son of a father who had bought his own freedom and a mother who had escaped slavery. In 1847 he went to work as a janitor and clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. After 1852 he led the city's reorganized Vigilance Committee, which sheltered freedom seekers and sent them onward.

Still wrote down their stories, nearly 650 of them in about eight years. Many helpers destroyed their records after 1850, but Still kept his, and during the Civil War he hid them in the loft of a cemetery building. In 1850 a man who came to his office searching for his family turned out to be Still's own brother Peter, left in slavery when their mother escaped forty years earlier. That reunion, Still wrote, moved him to preserve the records. He published them in 1872 as The Underground Rail Road.

Still's book records the escape of Henry Brown from Richmond, Virginia, in 1849. A friend nailed Brown into a box two feet eight inches deep, two feet wide and three feet long, with one bladder of water and a few biscuits. The box went by Adams' Express to Philadelphia, marked "This side up with care." The trip took twenty-six hours, and for part of it he rode upside down. In Philadelphia, Still wrote, "He was then christened Henry Box Brown."

The most famous conductor was Harriet Tubman. Born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, in early 1822, she escaped in 1849, when her enslaver died and she was about to be sold. Over the next ten years she made about thirteen trips back into Maryland and brought out about seventy people, mostly family and friends. She gave instructions to about seventy more, who found their way north on their own. She signaled with songs; Sarah Bradford's biography names two, "Go Down Moses" and "Bound for the Promised Land," and Tubman said she changed their tempo to show whether it was safe to come out.

Here the five questions matter again. Bradford's 1868 biography claimed that Tubman rescued three hundred people on nineteen trips. Tubman herself, in 1858 and 1859, told audiences she had rescued fifty to sixty people in eight or nine trips. That was before her last mission, in December 1860, when she brought away seven more. The National Park Service follows Tubman's own words and the documents, not the legend.

Remember: The Underground Railroad was first of all the resistance of freedom seekers themselves, aided by networks in which Black organizers such as William Still, David Ruggles and Harriet Tubman were central; its records, not its legends, show how it worked.

Pictures as arguments

The camera spread in the same years as the great narratives, and Black abolitionists used it as another way to tell freedom. According to the National Park Service, Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, with more than 160 photographs and portraits. In them he wears a suit and tie and looks sternly at the camera. He understood what cheap photographs could do. Anyone could now own a likeness, and "men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them." He predicted:

It is evident that the great cheapness and universality of pictures must exert a powerful, though silent, influence upon the ideas and sentiment of present and future generations.

Sojourner Truth sold small photographic cards of herself, called cartes de visite, printed with the line "I sell the shadow to support the substance." The picture was the shadow, and the money it raised supported the substance: Truth herself and her work.

Not every famous image was made by its subject. In March or April 1863, the photographers McPherson and Oliver made a portrait of a man named Gordon in a Union army camp along the Mississippi River. He had taken refuge there after escaping from a nearby plantation. He sits with his bare back to the camera, and the back is covered with thick, raised scars from whipping. On 4 July 1863, Harper's Weekly printed engravings of this and two other portraits of Gordon. Studios across the North, Mathew Brady's among them, copied and sold the photograph, known as "The Scourged Back." The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls it perhaps the most famous of all Civil War portraits of enslaved people.

Apply the five questions to a picture. Douglass and Truth chose their own poses and controlled their own images. Gordon's image was made and sold by others, for Northern viewers, to prove slavery's cruelty. All three are evidence, but evidence of different things.

Remember: Photographs were arguments. Douglass and Truth used portraits to claim dignity and independence, while "The Scourged Back" was made and circulated by others to expose slavery's violence.

Common misconceptions

• The Underground Railroad was a system of tunnels run by white abolitionists. It was neither a railroad nor a tunnel system. The Park Service defines it as enslaved people's own efforts to escape, aided by many people, among whom Black organizers were central.
• Harriet Tubman rescued three hundred people and had a $40,000 bounty on her head. She brought out about seventy people in about thirteen trips. The only known reward for her capture was $100, offered in October 1849.
• Quilts with secret codes guided freedom seekers. The Park Service calls the quilt code a myth. Tubman relied on trusted people, routes she knew, disguises, letters and songs.
• Slave narratives were really written by white abolitionists. Douglass and Jacobs wrote their own books, and Child's letters show that her editing was minor.
• A narrative that hides details cannot be trusted. Douglass and Jacobs concealed methods and names to protect others, and later evidence confirmed their accounts.

What to remember

• Ask five questions of any narrative: who wrote and vouched for it, when and for whom it was published, what its purpose was, what it hides and why, and what can be checked.
• Douglass's Narrative (1845) named names but hid his escape; his 1881 account and the National Park Service show that Anna Murray's money and a borrowed sailor's protection carried him north on 3 September 1838.
• Jacobs's Incidents (1861) disguised names, exposed the sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and is confirmed by her editor's letters and by Norcom's 1835 reward notice.
• The Underground Railroad was freedom seekers' own resistance, more organized after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, recorded by William Still and carried out by people like Harriet Tubman, who brought out about seventy people.
• Portraits of Douglass and Truth, and the photograph of Gordon, show pictures working as arguments; the five questions apply to images too.

Sources

1. Jacobs, H. A. (1861). Incidents in the life of a slave girl. Written by herself (L. M. Child, Ed.). Published for the Author. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Andrews, W. L. (n.d.). Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina. docsouth.unc.edu
3. Lemon, A. (n.d.). Summary of Incidents in the life of a slave girl. Documenting the American South. docsouth.unc.edu
4. Yellin, J. F. (Ed.). (1987). Incidents in the life of a slave girl, written by herself. Harvard University Press.
5. PBS. (1998). Runaway notice for Harriet Jacobs [American Beacon, 4 July 1835]. Africans in America. pbs.org
6. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave (chap. 11). Anti-Slavery Office. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
7. Douglass, F. (1881). Life and times of Frederick Douglass. Park Publishing. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
8. National Park Service. (n.d.). Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. nps.gov
9. National Park Service. (2025). What is the Underground Railroad? Network to Freedom. nps.gov
10. U.S. Congress. (1850). Fugitive Slave Act. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu
11. Still, W. (1872). The underground rail road. Porter and Coates. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
12. ExplorePAhistory.com. (n.d.). William Still [Historical marker and background]. WITF and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. explorepahistory.com
13. Documenting the American South. (n.d.). Summary of Narrative of Henry Box Brown (C. Stearns, 1849). docsouth.unc.edu
14. National Park Service. (n.d.). Harriet Tubman. nps.gov
15. National Park Service. (n.d.). Myths and facts about Harriet Tubman [Fact sheet]. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park. nps.gov
16. National Park Service. (n.d.). Frederick Douglass and the power of photography. nps.gov
17. Stauffer, J., Trodd, Z., & Bernier, C.-M. (2015). Picturing Frederick Douglass. Liveright.
18. McPherson and Oliver. (1863). The scourged back [Albumen silver print]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (on loan from the International Center of Photography). metmuseum.org

Three men at Fort Monroe, May 1861

On 23 May 1861, a few weeks into the Civil War, three enslaved men slipped away in Confederate Virginia and made their way into Fort Monroe, the Union fortress at the mouth of Hampton Roads. Their names were Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend. They had been enslaved by Colonel Charles King Mallory, a Virginia militia commander, and forced to build Confederate fortifications at Sewell's Point. The next day a Confederate officer, Major John Baytop Cary, came to the fort to demand them back under the Fugitive Slave Act.

The fort's commander, General Benjamin F. Butler, refused. Virginia claimed to have left the Union, he reasoned, so its citizens could no longer claim the protection of federal law. And because the men had been forced to work on enemy fortifications, they were property with military value, which the army could keep. Escaped people in Union hands soon came to be called "contrabands of war." Butler's decision said nothing about emancipation. Yet within days more freedom seekers arrived, and before long hundreds were sheltering under the fort's guns. They called it "Freedom's Fortress."

This lesson follows the war from the point of view of the people it eventually freed. It asks how enslaved and free Black Americans helped turn a war to restore the Union into a war for freedom. Then it asks how their communities have remembered the days when freedom came.

A war for the Union becomes a war for freedom

When the war began, President Abraham Lincoln's aim was to restore the Union, and he had promised not to disturb slavery where it already existed. Congress moved first, and cautiously. On 6 August 1861 the First Confiscation Act approved Butler's policy: enslaved people used for military purposes against the United States could be taken from their owners. When General John C. Frémont declared enslaved people free across Missouri later that month, Lincoln revoked the order and removed him. He feared that slaveholding border states such as Missouri and Kentucky would join the Confederacy.

Enslaved people kept forcing the question. At about three in the morning on 13 May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved pilot on the Confederate transport Planter, fired up its boilers while the white crew was ashore in Charleston. He picked up waiting family members, then steamed past Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, wearing a captain's hat and giving the right signals. With sixteen enslaved people aboard, he turned the ship over to the U.S. Navy. Smalls went on to pilot Union vessels, and by 1864 he had bought the Beaufort house of the man who had once enslaved him.

Washington moved next. On 16 April 1862 Lincoln signed a law ending slavery in the District of Columbia. It freed people at once, but it also paid loyal owners up to $300 for each person freed and offered up to $100 to each freed person who chose to emigrate. Commissioners approved petitions covering 2,989 people. On 17 July 1862 the Second Confiscation and Militia Act freed people whose enslavers served the Confederacy. Then, on 1 January 1863, came the Emancipation Proclamation:

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.

Read the proclamation closely and its limits appear. It applied only to areas still in rebellion, not to the loyal border states. It also listed parts of Louisiana and Virginia already under Union control, which were "left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued." Yet it did something new as well. It announced that "such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States."

That New Year's Day, the First South Carolina Volunteers, one of the first Black regiments, gathered at Camp Saxton near Beaufort to hear the proclamation read aloud. Susie King Taylor, who traveled with the regiment, remembered the day:

It was a glorious day for us all, and we enjoyed every minute of it, and as a fitting close and the crowning event of this occasion we had a grand barbecue.

What matters here: Freedom began with the actions of enslaved people like Baker, Mallory, Townsend and Smalls; laws and the Emancipation Proclamation followed, freeing people where the Union army could reach and opening the army to Black men.

Soldiers, scouts, teachers and refugees

Frederick Douglass became a recruiter, and two of his own sons served the Union cause. He told Black men what service could win:

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.

By the end of the war, according to the National Archives, about 179,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the Union Army, about one in ten of its soldiers, and another 19,000 in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 died, about 30,000 of them from infection or disease. Black regiments fought at Milliken's Bend and Port Hudson in Louisiana, at Petersburg in Virginia and at Nashville in Tennessee. In the July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina, the 54th Massachusetts lost two-thirds of its officers and half of its men. Nearly eighty Black men became commissioned officers, though most Black regiments were commanded by white officers.

Black soldiers also faced discrimination inside the army. At first they were paid $10 a month, minus $3 for clothing, while white soldiers received $13 with no deduction. In June 1864 Congress granted equal pay and made it retroactive. Captured Black soldiers faced greater dangers. In 1863 the Confederate Congress threatened to enslave them and to punish their officers severely, and Lincoln answered with an order threatening reprisals. At Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864, Confederate soldiers shot and killed Black Union soldiers who had been captured. The National Archives calls it perhaps the most heinous known example of such abuse.

Women served without enlisting. Harriet Tubman worked in South Carolina as a nurse, scout and spy. On 1 June 1863 she joined Colonel James Montgomery and the 2nd South Carolina, a regiment of formerly enslaved men, in a raid on plantations along the Combahee River. The National Park Service reports that the raid rescued more than 700 enslaved people, many of whom then joined the Union army.

Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848 and learned to read at a secret school in Savannah run by a free Black woman. At fourteen she escaped with her uncle's family to Union-held islands off the coast. There she ran a school for about forty children and for adults who came at night. Then she traveled with the First South Carolina Volunteers, later the 33rd United States Colored Troops, as laundress, nurse and teacher:

I taught a great many of the comrades in Company E to read and write, when they were off duty. Nearly all were anxious to learn.

"I gave my services willingly for four years and three months without receiving a dollar," she wrote in her memoir of 1902.

For many refugees, freedom began in hardship. In September 1862 Harriet Jacobs, whose narrative Lesson 14 examined, wrote to the Liberator about the contraband camp at Duff Green's Row in Washington. She found men, women and children crowded together, many sick with measles, diphtheria and fevers, with as many as ten deaths in a single day. Employers hired single women for four dollars a month and men for ten. Jacobs saw faces that seemed to ask, "Is this freedom?" Among the refugees in Alexandria, Virginia, she reported, "All expressed a willingness to work." She stayed to help, and from 1863 to 1865 she and her daughter ran a school for freed people in Alexandria.

What matters here: Black Americans fought for the Union in large numbers, despite unequal pay and special dangers, while Black women scouted, nursed and taught, and refugees built new lives out of hardship.

Freedom in law, and the news in Texas

The proclamation could not end slavery everywhere, and Lincoln knew a constitutional amendment would be needed. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on 31 January 1865, and enough states had ratified it by 6 December 1865:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Notice the exception for punishment of crime. Later lessons show how Southern states used it.

Meanwhile the news of freedom traveled unevenly. On 19 June 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Major General Gordon Granger, whose troops had reached Galveston the day before, issued General Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The order went on to advise freed people "to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages" and warned that they would "not be supported in idleness." The National Archives observes that this language foreshadowed the fight for equal rights still to come.

What matters here: The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in law, with an exception for punishment of crime, and General Order No. 3 shows how late and how unevenly freedom reached many people.

Freedom days

Black communities had long used holidays to argue about freedom. On 5 July 1852, Frederick Douglass spoke to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, on the day after Independence Day, which he had insisted on. He asked:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

After the war, African Americans created holidays of their own. The National Park Service notes that communities celebrated many different Emancipation Days, and that their variety reflected how gradually freedom actually arrived.

Juneteenth became the best known. According to the National Archives, African American communities in Texas have celebrated it since 1866, and celebrations later spread to other states. On 17 June 2021, Public Law 117-17 made "Juneteenth National Independence Day" a legal public holiday of the United States. The many freedom days are a reminder that freedom did not arrive on one date, and that the struggle to make it real went on long after.

Common misconceptions

• The Emancipation Proclamation freed every enslaved person on 1 January 1863. It applied only to areas in rebellion, not to the loyal border states or the listed occupied areas; freedom spread as Union armies advanced, and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery nationwide in December 1865.
• The Union fought to end slavery from the start. Lincoln's first aim was to restore the Union. Enslaved people's flight, the Confiscation Acts and Black military service helped make emancipation a war aim.
• Black soldiers played only a small part. About 179,000 served in the Union Army, one in ten of its soldiers, and 19,000 in the Navy.
• Juneteenth marks the end of slavery everywhere. It marks the announcement of freedom in Texas; only the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery throughout the nation.
• Freedom was simply handed down. People like Baker, Mallory, Townsend, Smalls and Tubman took freedom and pushed the government to respond.

The short version

• On 23 May 1861 Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend reached Fort Monroe; Butler kept them as "contrabands," and hundreds followed.
• The First Confiscation Act (1861), the end of slavery in Washington (16 April 1862) and the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) widened freedom step by step, and the proclamation opened the army to Black men.
• About 179,000 Black soldiers and 19,000 sailors served, despite unequal pay until 1864 and special dangers when captured; Tubman, Susie King Taylor and Harriet Jacobs scouted, nursed and taught.
• The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified by 6 December 1865, ended slavery except as punishment for crime; General Order No. 3 announced freedom in Texas on 19 June 1865.
• Black communities marked many freedom days; Juneteenth, celebrated in Texas since 1866, became a federal holiday in 2021.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (2024). Fort Monroe and the "contrabands of war". Fort Monroe National Monument. nps.gov
2. Quarstein, J. V. (2021, May 28). Ben Butler and the contrabands. The Mariners' Museum and Park. marinersmuseum.org
3. Encyclopedia Virginia. (2020, updated 2024). Fort Monroe during the Civil War. Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Robert Smalls. nps.gov
5. National Archives. (2019). The District of Columbia Emancipation Act. archives.gov
6. Lincoln, A. (1863). The Emancipation Proclamation [Transcript]. National Archives. archives.gov
7. National Archives. (2023). Black soldiers in the U.S. military during the Civil War. archives.gov
8. National Park Service. (n.d.). Harriet Tubman. nps.gov
9. Taylor, S. K. (1902). Reminiscences of my life in camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, late 1st S. C. Volunteers. The author. Documenting the American South. docsouth.unc.edu
10. Jacobs, H. A. (1862, September 5). Life among the contrabands. The Liberator. Encyclopedia Virginia. encyclopediavirginia.org
11. National Archives. (n.d.). 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of slavery (1865). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
12. Davis, M. (2020, June 19). National Archives safeguards original "Juneteenth" General Order. National Archives News. archives.gov
13. Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, Pub. L. No. 117-17, 135 Stat. 287 (2021). govinfo.gov
14. National Park Service. (2021). Juneteenth in Gettysburg. Gettysburg National Military Park. nps.gov
15. Douglass, F. (1852, July 5). What to the slave is the Fourth of July? Teaching American History. teachingamericanhistory.org

Twenty ministers and a general, January 1865

At eight in the evening on 12 January 1865, twenty Black ministers and church leaders met with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General William T. Sherman at Sherman's headquarters in Savannah, Georgia, which the Union army had recently entered. The official minutes list each man's age, birthplace and path to freedom. Some had been born free. Some had bought themselves, and others had been freed by the Union army only weeks before. They chose Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old Baptist minister who had bought freedom for himself and his wife eight years earlier for $1,000 in gold and silver, to speak for them all.

Asked what they understood by slavery and freedom, Frazier answered:

Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.

And how could freed people take care of themselves?

The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor ... We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.

Frazier's answers set out the problem of this lesson. Freedom, he said, meant owning the fruit of your own labor. That required land, control over your own work and the security of your family. Former enslavers wanted the opposite: to keep Black workers on plantations, under their control, at the lowest cost. The federal government stood in between and wavered. Which side would decide what freedom meant?

Forty acres, promised and taken back

Four days after the meeting, on 16 January 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15. It set aside the islands south of Charleston, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles inland, and the land along the St. Johns River in Florida "for the settlement of the negroes now made free." Each family could receive "a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground," with a written possessory title. On those settlements, the order said, "the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves."

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture reports that the order made 400,000 acres available to 40,000 people, and that Sherman later promised Army mules for their use. Here is the origin of the phrase "forty acres and a mule." But the titles were temporary, good "until Congress shall regulate their title." Less than a year later, according to the museum, President Andrew Johnson revoked Sherman's order and returned the land to its former owners.

In October 1865 General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the new Freedmen's Bureau, went to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to tell the freedpeople settled there that the President had ordered the land restored to its former owners. He telegraphed Stanton that they would submit "with evident sorrow, to the breaking of the promise of General Sherman's order." The freedpeople chose a committee, Henry Bram, Ishmael Moultrie and Yates Sampson, who wrote to Howard:

General we want Homestead's; we were promised Homestead's by the government ... Landless, Homeless. Voteless. we can only pray to god & Hope for His Help

Howard wrote back sympathetically, but he advised them to sign contracts, leasing land or working for wages, and to petition Congress. Most of the land was lost.

Bottom line: Freedpeople asked first for land, and for a few months on the Georgia and South Carolina coast they received it; the reversal of Sherman's order left most freed families landless.

The Freedmen's Bureau

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen's Bureau, within the War Department on 3 March 1865. According to the National Archives, it issued rations and clothing, ran hospitals and refugee camps, and supervised labor contracts between planters and freedpeople. It helped benevolent societies set up schools. It helped legalize marriages made during slavery and provided transportation for people trying to reunite with their families. The National Archives calls its records an invaluable source for historians and genealogists. Most of its work was done between June 1865 and December 1868, and Congress abolished it in 1872.

The Bureau was a new thing: a federal agency for the welfare of freed people. But it was small, it was short-lived, and on land it carried out Johnson's orders rather than freedpeople's wishes. Its leaders urged freedpeople to sign contracts with landowners, as Howard did on Edisto Island.

Families found and remade

Slavery had broken families apart by sale, as Lesson 7 showed. Freedom let people search for them. Couples whose marriages had no legal standing under slavery made them official, often with the Bureau's help. Others searched for years. The Last Seen project has collected thousands of "Information Wanted" advertisements placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people looking for relatives. The earliest it has found appeared in the Liberator in 1832, they multiplied after 1865, and one ran as late as 1922. In 1879, fourteen years after emancipation, a man in Texas wrote to the Southwestern Christian Advocate of New Orleans:

DEAR EDITOR: I wish information of my mother, Elvie Braxton, brothers Thomas and Archie, and sister Elizabeth Braxton. Our father, Harrison Braxton, is dead. I was sold from King Williams county, Virginia, in 1856, by Wm. M. Garrick to Messrs. Robinson & Smith, who brought me to Alabama; there I was sold to Edwin A. Glover and brought to Texas.

Robert Braxton's ad names the traders and the dates, like a record of the domestic slave trade written by one of its victims. Many such ads ran in church newspapers like this one, which carried them across the country.

Bottom line: Rebuilding families was one of freedom's first acts; legal marriages and decades of searching show how deeply slavery had divided Black families and how hard freedpeople worked to reunite them.

Who controls Black labor?

Former enslavers moved quickly to rebuild control. On 3 July 1865, the Board of Police of Opelousas, Louisiana, ordered that no freedman could enter the town "without special permission from his employer." Freedpeople could not rent a house in town, hold a public meeting, preach or carry a weapon without permission, and anyone living in town had to be "in the regular service of some white person or former owner." Breaking these rules meant jail and forced work on the streets.

Statewide Black Codes followed. Mississippi passed the first in November 1865. The historian Nancy Bercaw, writing in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, describes three parts. Civil rights laws let freedpeople use the courts but not testify against white people, and barred them from renting land outside towns. Labor laws required written contracts, and a worker who left before the contract ended forfeited all the wages earned so far. Under the vagrancy law, any Black person without a written contract two weeks after New Year's Day could be jailed, with no jury trial, and hired out by the sheriff.

An apprenticeship law let courts bind out Black children whose parents were judged too poor to support them, boys until 21 and girls until 18. Black parents protested and went to court to get their children back. Bercaw concludes that the codes backfired: Northern outrage helped turn opinion toward Black citizenship and voting.

Labor contracts show the same struggle on single plantations. A contract signed on 1 June 1865 in Autauga County, Alabama, gave the freedpeople "the one fourth part of the present crop of wheat," part of the corn and potatoes, ten-hour days and a promise "to be willing to be controlled" by the planter. Freedpeople pushed back by bargaining, by moving and by resisting a return to supervised gang labor. Jourdon Anderson, who had left Tennessee and settled in Dayton, Ohio, answered his former enslaver's invitation to come back to Tennessee with a bill:

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.

"If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past," his letter of 7 August 1865 continued, "we can have little faith in your promises in the future." He asked whether his daughters would be safe and whether there were schools nearby, because "The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education." The letter was printed that year with the note "Written just as he dictated it," so the five questions of Lesson 14 apply to it too.

Out of this struggle came sharecropping. The historian Ronald L. F. Davis explains in the Mississippi Encyclopedia that freedpeople at first preferred it to fixed wages paid at the end of the year, which they knew were open to fraud. Sharecropping let families farm their own plots with less supervision, in return for a share of the crop. Croppers who received tools, animals and supplies from the landowner usually kept half the crop. But supplies were advanced on credit, and furnishing merchants charged interest of 25 to 65 percent. After Reconstruction, Davis writes, most sharecroppers ended each year in debt, and the debt kept them from moving to find better terms.

Bottom line: Black Codes and contracts tried to rebuild slavery's control over Black labor; freedpeople resisted by bargaining, moving and choosing family farming, and sharecropping emerged as a compromise that later became a trap of debt.

Common misconceptions

• Freed people received forty acres and a mule. Sherman's order made about 400,000 acres available to some 40,000 people on the southern coast, but Johnson returned most of the land to former owners within a year.
• The Freedmen's Bureau gave freedpeople land and protected them for decades. It existed from 1865 to 1872, did most of its work before 1869, and often pressed freedpeople into contracts with former enslavers.
• Black Codes simply described the end of slavery. They granted some rights, such as using the courts, while restricting land, movement, labor and children's freedom.
• Sharecropping was forced on freedpeople from the start. Many first preferred it to supervised gang labor and cheatable wages; debt and law made it a trap later.
• Families separated by slavery were lost forever. Many searched for decades through newspapers and churches, and some found one another.

Summing up

• On 12 January 1865 Garrison Frazier told Stanton and Sherman that freedom meant reaping "the fruit of our own labor," and that freed people needed land.
• Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside forty-acre plots on the coast; Johnson returned most of the land, and the Edisto Island committee protested, "we want Homestead's."
• The Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1872) gave relief, helped schools, legalized marriages, reunited families and supervised labor contracts.
• The Opelousas ordinance and Mississippi's Black Code of November 1865 restricted movement, land, labor and children; vagrancy laws let sheriffs hire out jailed freedpeople.
• Jourdon Anderson's bill for $11,680 and the Information Wanted ads show freedpeople claiming wages, schooling and family; sharecropping began as a compromise and became a trap of debt.

Sources

1. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. (n.d.). Newspaper account of a meeting between Black religious leaders and Union military authorities [New-York Daily Tribune, 13 February 1865]. University of Maryland. freedmen.umd.edu
2. Sherman, W. T. (1865, January 16). Special Field Orders, No. 15. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. freedmen.umd.edu
3. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Pursuing land. Searchable Museum, Smithsonian Institution. searchablemuseum.com
4. Bram, H., Moultrie, I., & Sampson, Y. (1865, October). Committee of freedmen on Edisto Island to the Freedmen's Bureau commissioner; and the latter's reply. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. freedmen.umd.edu
5. National Archives. (n.d.). The Freedmen's Bureau. African American Heritage. archives.gov
6. Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery. (n.d.). About. informationwanted.org
7. Braxton, R. (1879, April 10). Robert Braxton looking for his mother Evie Braxton and siblings. Southwestern Christian Advocate. Last Seen. informationwanted.org
8. Board of Police of Opelousas. (1865, July 3). Ordinance relative to the police of recently emancipated negroes or freedmen. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. freedmen.umd.edu
9. Bercaw, N. (2018). Black Codes. Mississippi Encyclopedia. Center for Study of Southern Culture. mississippiencyclopedia.org
10. Freedmen and Southern Society Project. (n.d.). Contract between an Alabama planter and Alabama freedpeople [1 June 1865]. freedmen.umd.edu
11. Anderson, J. (1865). Letter from a freedman to his old master [7 August 1865]. In L. M. Child (Ed.), The freedmen's book. Ticknor and Fields. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
12. Davis, R. L. F. (2018). Sharecropping. Mississippi Encyclopedia. Center for Study of Southern Culture. mississippiencyclopedia.org

The Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood, 25 February 1870

On 25 February 1870, visitors packed the galleries of the United States Senate. When Hiram Revels of Mississippi entered the chamber to take his oath, they burst into applause. Revels was about to become the first African American to serve in Congress. He was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1827. He studied at seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and at Knox College in Illinois, and became a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. During the war he helped raise Black regiments in Maryland and served as a chaplain in Mississippi. In 1869 he was one of 35 African Americans elected to Mississippi's legislature, which chose him for the Senate seat left empty since 1861.

Three senators tried to block him. Citing the Dred Scott decision of 1857, they argued that Revels had not been a citizen for the nine years the Constitution requires. His supporters answered that the Fourteenth Amendment had overturned Dred Scott and that Revels had voted in Ohio long before the war. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts ended the debate: "The time has passed for argument. Nothing more need be said." The Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips called Revels "the Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood."

Ten months later, on 12 December 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first Black member of the House of Representatives. Within five years, fourteen more Black members followed Revels and Rainey to Congress. Yet by 1877 Reconstruction was over. This lesson asks how that happened, and why for decades Americans were taught a false story about it.

Three amendments

Congress wrote the results of the war into the Constitution. In March 1867, its Reconstruction Acts placed ten former Confederate states under military districts. Commanders registered Black men to vote and oversaw new state constitutions written by conventions elected by Black and white men together. In 1867 African Americans across the South organized to vote for the first time.

The Fifteenth Amendment protected Black men's votes, not women's. Four years earlier, the poet and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper had warned white suffragists not to separate the two causes. Speaking at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York on 10 May 1866, she described streetcar conductors in Philadelphia who stopped their cars rather than let her ride, and told her audience: "You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs." Her argument rested on one principle:

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

Why this matters: The Reconstruction Amendments made Black Americans citizens and Black men voters in the Constitution itself, but within a few years courts and states had begun to empty them of force.

The myth to debug: Reconstruction as a "tragic era"

For much of the twentieth century, Americans learned a different story. The historian Eric Foner summarizes it. In this version, Reconstruction was an age of corruption and misrule, in which Northern "carpetbaggers," Southern white "scalawags" and freedpeople supposedly unfit to vote plundered the defeated South, until the Ku Klux Klan and its allies restored "home rule." This view was named the Dunning School, after William A. Dunning of Columbia University, who trained a generation of historians in the early 1900s. The film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Klan, and Claude Bowers's best-selling book The Tragic Era (1929) carried it to millions. Foner points out that the underlying principle of all these works was the assumption of Black incapacity. Their political lesson was that white Southerners had been right to take away Black men's votes.

Debugging a story means stating each of its claims and testing it against evidence. Here are three.

Test 1: Did Black officeholders rule the South?

According to the National Park Service's study of the era, about 2,000 Black men held local political offices between the Civil War and the end of the century. Most served where the Black population was large. The House of Representatives' historians count 20 Black representatives and 2 Black senators between 1870 and 1901. The high point came in 1875-1877, with seven in the House and one in the Senate. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi took his Senate seat in March 1875. He was the second African American senator and the only formerly enslaved person ever to serve in the Senate, and the last Black senator from a Southern state until 2013.

Meanwhile, the Park Service study notes, white men held a disproportionate share of Republican offices. Black officeholders were real and important, but they never "ruled" the South.

Test 2: Were Reconstruction governments failures?

The new state constitutions of 1867-1868 created public schools for Black and white children, and many banned racial discrimination in public places such as streetcars and hotels. Republican governments taxed large landholdings and spent the money on public schools and on railroads and other projects. They had real flaws, but Foner's summary of today's scholarship is that their achievements were real too. In Congress, Black members argued for civil rights; South Carolina's Robert B. Elliott spoke in January 1874 for the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed equal treatment in railroads, hotels and other public accommodations.

Test 3: Did Reconstruction collapse on its own?

The record shows it was overthrown. Democrats, sometimes organized in the Ku Klux Klan, used intimidation, violence and fraud to win elections, and Black communities sometimes formed militias to fight back. On Easter Sunday, 13 April 1873, Black Republicans led by William Ward, a freedman and former Army sergeant, were holding the parish courthouse at Colfax, Louisiana. A white militia attacked them. Between 80 and 150 African Americans were killed, most of them after they had surrendered. In 1874 the White League in Louisiana openly targeted Republican officeholders. That December, armed white gangs in Vicksburg, Mississippi, killed as many as three hundred Black people to overthrow the city's biracial government.

The federal government stepped back. In March 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had gone too far in letting federal courts punish violations of Black rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The men prosecuted for the Colfax massacre went free. Mississippi Democrats carried the state in 1875 by terror and ballot-box fraud, a method copied in South Carolina in 1876. The disputed presidential election of 1876 was settled for Rutherford B. Hayes, and in April 1877 he withdrew the federal troops guarding the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana. The Republican governments collapsed. The House historians describe what followed as "a coordinated policy of discrimination, intimidation, and violence" to block Black political participation.

Why this matters: Each claim of the "tragic era" story fails the test: Black officeholders served but did not rule, Reconstruction governments built schools and passed civil rights laws, and the era ended through organized violence and federal retreat, not Black incapacity.

How historians fixed the story

The correction began with Black scholars. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the Dunning School in a 1910 article, "Reconstruction and Its Benefits," and then in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois argued that enslaved people had freed themselves by withdrawing their labor during the war, which he called a "general strike," and that Reconstruction was a serious attempt at interracial democracy. His final chapter, "The Propaganda of History," accused historians of sacrificing truth to racism. Foner notes that some of Du Bois's claims, such as how coordinated the "general strike" was, remain open to question. But he concludes that many of Du Bois's insights are now taken for granted. In Foner's words, for Du Bois the era was "tragic not because it was attempted, but because it failed."

Since the 1960s, the National Park Service study reports, historians have challenged and often discredited the Dunning School. Its authors had seen Black Americans as at best second-class citizens and Reconstruction as a mistake born of Northern vindictiveness. Today the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in Beaufort, South Carolina, tells the story of the era from the evidence.

Common misconceptions

• Reconstruction failed because freedpeople were unready for citizenship. It was overthrown by violence, fraud and federal retreat, from Colfax in 1873 to the withdrawal of troops in 1877.
• Black politicians controlled Southern governments. About 2,000 held local offices over three decades and 22 served in Congress from 1870 to 1901, while white men held a disproportionate share of Republican offices.
• The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments secured Black rights from 1870 on. The Supreme Court narrowed them in 1873 and 1876, and Southern states later disfranchised most Black voters.
• The "tragic era" account was neutral scholarship. Historians now show it rested on the assumption of Black incapacity and served to justify disfranchisement.
• Women's rights and Black rights were separate causes. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper argued in 1866 that "We are all bound up together."

What to carry forward

• On 25 February 1870 Hiram Revels became the first African American in Congress, seated by a vote of 48 to 8; Joseph Rainey followed in the House that December.
• The Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments ended slavery, made Black Americans citizens and barred racial bars to the vote.
• About 2,000 Black men held local office; Reconstruction governments created public schools and passed civil rights laws.
• Colfax (1873), the White League, the Mississippi Plan (1875), Cruikshank (1876) and the withdrawal of troops in 1877 overthrew Reconstruction.
• The Dunning School's "tragic era" story assumed Black incapacity; Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) and later historians overturned it.

Sources

1. U.S. Senate Historical Office. (2020). First African American senator. Senate Stories. senate.gov
2. Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). "The Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood": 1870-1901. Black Americans in Congress. history.house.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil rights (1868). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. National Archives. (n.d.). 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting rights (1870). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
5. Harper, F. E. W. (1866/2024). We are all bound up together [Speech, 10 May 1866] (G. E. Pauley, Ed.). Voices of Democracy, University of Maryland. voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu
6. Downs, G. P., & Masur, K. (2017). The era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900: A National Historic Landmarks theme study. National Park Service. nps.gov
7. Foner, E. (2013). Black Reconstruction: An introduction. South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(3), 409-418. ericfoner.com
8. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America. Harcourt, Brace.
9. National Park Service. (n.d.). Reconstruction Era National Historical Park. nps.gov

The lynching at the Curve, March 1892

In the spring of 1892, three young Black men in Memphis, Tennessee, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, ran the People's Grocery in a crowded neighborhood just outside the city limits known as the Curve. A white grocer across the street, named Barrett, resented the competition. After a quarrel, he threatened, in Ida B. Wells's account, to "clean them out." Hearing that an attack was coming, the grocers and their neighbors armed themselves. When a group of twelve men in plain clothes came through the back door at night, the defenders fired, wounding three of them. Only then did they learn that the men were deputies. Thirty-one Black men were jailed. On 9 March 1892 a mob took Moss, McDowell and Stewart from the jail and shot them to death.

The killings changed the life of Ida B. Wells, a co-owner of the Black newspaper Free Speech. Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on 16 July 1862, she had become a teacher at sixteen after yellow fever killed her parents. In 1884 she sued a railroad that had forcibly removed her from the first-class ladies' coach, won $500 in a lower court, and lost when Tennessee's Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1887. After the lynching, Wells urged Black Memphians to leave the city, and thousands did. Those who stayed stopped riding the streetcars, until company officials came to the Free Speech to ask for their customers back. This lesson follows the system that made such killings possible, and the people who fought it.

Facts against a lie

White newspapers justified lynching as punishment for the rape of white women. On 21 May 1892 Wells wrote in the Free Speech that nobody believed "the old thread-bare lie." Three days later a meeting at the Memphis Cotton Exchange threatened the editors. While Wells was away in Philadelphia, a committee destroyed the newspaper's office and warned her not to return. From New York she published the evidence in a pamphlet, Southern Horrors (1892), which she called "a contribution to truth, an array of facts." Three years later came A Red Record. To be safe from charges of exaggeration, Wells used only the lynching counts compiled each year by a white newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:

The purpose of the pages which follow shall be to give the record which has been made, not by colored men, but that which is the result of compilations made by white men, of reports sent over the civilized world by white men in the South. Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned.

The numbers made her case. Two-thirds of the victims had not even been accused of rape, and being accused was not the same as being guilty. The 1893 list included people lynched for "insulting whites," for "race prejudice" and for "no offense" at all. The Memphis grocers had been killed, Wells argued, because they were successful and refused to be pushed aside. She also gave advice that shocked many readers: "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home," because armed self-defense had stopped lynchings where the law would not.

Wells took the campaign abroad, lecturing in Great Britain in 1893 and 1894. In 1898 she met President William McKinley to ask for a federal law against lynching. She later helped found the National Association of Colored Women and, in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club. The historian Miriam DeCosta-Willis, writing in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, calls her antilynching campaign the work that made her one of the most outstanding African American women of her century.

In short: Wells turned the lynchers' own newspapers into evidence, showing that most victims were never even accused of rape, and answered terror with publicity, boycotts, migration and self-defense.

Jim Crow in law

Segregation was written into law. In 1890 Louisiana passed a Separate Car Act requiring "equal but separate" railway cars. A Citizens' Committee of Black New Orleanians organized in 1891 to test it, and on 7 June 1892 Homer Plessy, who described himself as seven-eighths white, took a seat in a whites-only car and was arrested. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the law. Only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented:

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

Voting was taken away the same way. According to the House of Representatives' historians, Southern states rewrote their constitutions and laws between 1889 and 1908. They added property qualifications, poll taxes and literacy tests. Grandfather clauses tied the vote to whether a man's ancestors had voted, and "understanding clauses" let registrars decide who understood the law.

The Thirteenth Amendment's exception for punishment of crime, which Lesson 15 flagged, opened another door. Under Alabama's convict-lease system, from 1875 to 1928, the state and its counties rented prisoners to coal mines, lumberyards and farms. The historian Mary Ellen Curtin reports in the Encyclopedia of Alabama that more than 95 percent of county prisoners and 90 percent of state prisoners were African American. Many county convicts, sentenced for minor offenses, served extra months to pay their court costs, and whipping enforced the work. Many called the system a new form of slavery. Alabama was the last state to abolish convict leasing, in 1928.

Violence enforced the whole order. On 10 November 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, white citizens killed at least seven and possibly as many as twenty Black residents and overthrew the city's elected government. In Congress, George H. White of North Carolina, one of the era's last Black congressmen, introduced the first federal antilynching bill on 20 January 1900. It failed. Not until March 2022, in the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, did Congress make lynching a federal hate crime.

In short: Jim Crow was a legal system, not just a custom: segregation upheld in Plessy, disfranchisement written into state constitutions, and convict leasing built on the Thirteenth Amendment's exception, all backed by violence.

The Red Summer, 1919

Tens of thousands of Black veterans came home from the First World War in 1919, and the war had sped the migration of Black Southerners north. By the summer of 1919, according to the National WWI Museum and Memorial, about 500,000 African Americans had resettled in Northern cities. In May 1919, in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois told returning Black soldiers what their service demanded:

We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

That year, racial violence struck at least 26 American cities, and lynchings rose from 64 in 1918 to 83 in 1919. The museum notes that most mobs were made up of ordinary white civilians and veterans. In Washington, D.C., four days of attacks began on 19 July, and Black residents armed themselves and fought back.

In Chicago, on 27 July, a Black teenager named Eugene Williams drifted across an unofficial line in the water that divided a lakefront beach into Black and white parts. Stones were flying between groups on the shore, and Williams, clinging to a railroad tie, let go and drowned; the coroner's jury found that fear of the stones had kept him from shore. When a policeman refused to arrest the white man whom Black witnesses blamed, fighting spread across the city. The commission appointed to study the riot counted 38 dead, 23 Black and 15 white, and 537 injured.

The deadliest violence came near Elaine, Arkansas. On the night of 30 September 1919, Black sharecroppers met in a church to hire a lawyer to protect them from what they said were landowners' cheating. White men attacked the church, and a white man was killed. Over the next days whites hunted down and shot many Black people, and the governor sent about 500 army soldiers. The National WWI Museum estimates that upwards of 200 African Americans may have been killed. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death. The Supreme Court later described one of their trials: it lasted about three-quarters of an hour, and the jury took less than five minutes to convict.

Ida B. Wells returned to the South to investigate and published The Arkansas Race Riot in 1922. In Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Supreme Court ruled that a trial dominated by a mob could deny due process. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that federal courts must act if "the whole proceeding is a mask."

In July 1919 the poet Claude McKay published a sonnet, "If We Must Die," in the magazine The Liberator. It ends:

Oh, kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but--fighting back!

Two years later, on 31 May and 1 June 1921, a white mob destroyed Greenwood, the prosperous Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It began after armed Black men, many of them veterans, went to the courthouse to protect Dick Rowland, a Black shoe shiner whom a white mob meant to lynch. The historian Scott Ellsworth writes that more than a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed and that credible estimates of the dead range from fifty to three hundred.

In short: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa massacre of 1921 showed how far white violence would go, and how far Black Americans had come in their resolve to fight back, in the streets, in print and in court.

Common misconceptions

• Lynching punished real crimes, especially rape. Wells's figures, drawn from a white newspaper, showed that about two-thirds of victims were never even accused of rape, and some were killed for "insulting whites" or for no offense.
• Jim Crow was only social custom. It was law: Louisiana's Separate Car Act, upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and new state constitutions that stripped Black men of the vote.
• Black Southerners lost the vote as soon as Reconstruction ended. Many still voted in the 1880s and 1890s; laws passed between 1889 and 1908 cut Louisiana's Black registered voters from about 130,000 to about 1,300.
• Lynching and race riots were only Southern problems. Wells recorded lynchings in Illinois, Kansas and New York in 1893, and Chicago saw one of the worst riots of 1919.
• Black communities endured violence passively. They migrated, boycotted, published, organized, went to court and, in Washington, Chicago and Tulsa, defended themselves.

Looking back

• On 9 March 1892 a Memphis mob killed the grocers Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart; Ida B. Wells answered with an exodus, a streetcar boycott and her pen.
• Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895) used the Chicago Tribune's own counts to show that most lynching victims were never accused of rape.
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld "separate but equal," over Justice Harlan's dissent; between 1889 and 1908 Southern laws stripped most Black men of the vote.
• Convict leasing in Alabama (1875-1928) used the Thirteenth Amendment's exception to force mostly Black prisoners into mines and camps.
• In the Red Summer of 1919, violence struck at least 26 cities, from Washington and Chicago to Elaine, Arkansas; Du Bois, McKay and Wells called for resistance, and Moore v. Dempsey (1923) let federal courts review mob-dominated trials.

Sources

1. Wells, I. B. (1892). Southern horrors: Lynch law in all its phases. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Wells-Barnett, I. B. (1895). A red record: Tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynching in the United States. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. DeCosta-Willis, M. (2017, updated 2018). Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society. tennesseeencyclopedia.net
4. National Archives. (n.d.). Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
5. Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). Toward a "temporary farewell". Black Americans in Congress. history.house.gov
6. Curtin, M. E. (2007, updated 2025). Convict-lease system. Encyclopedia of Alabama. encyclopediaofalabama.org
7. Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Pub. L. No. 117-107, 136 Stat. 1125 (2022). govinfo.gov
8. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1919, May). Returning soldiers. The Crisis, 18(1), 13-14. Internet Archive. archive.org
9. National WWI Museum and Memorial. (n.d.). Red Summer: The race riots of 1919. theworldwar.org
10. Chicago Commission on Race Relations. (1922). The Negro in Chicago: A study of race relations and a race riot. University of Chicago Press. Internet Archive. archive.org
11. Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
12. McKay, C. (1919, July). If we must die. The Liberator, 2(7). Internet Archive. archive.org
13. Ellsworth, S. (2010, updated 2024). Tulsa Race Massacre. The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. okhistory.org

Atlanta, 18 September 1895

On 18 September 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, a Black educator rose to address a crowd that was mostly white. Booker T. Washington had been born into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1856. At sixteen he had made his way more than 500 miles to Hampton Institute, paying his way as a janitor. In 1881 he opened Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with 30 students. Now, in a short speech, he offered the white South a bargain:

In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

The speech made Washington famous. Six years later he became the first African American invited to dinner at the White House. W. E. B. Du Bois later gave the speech the nickname by which it is still known: the "Atlanta Compromise."

The timing matters. Lesson 18 showed what was happening in 1895: lynching at its height, Black men losing the vote, and the Supreme Court a year away from approving segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. How should Black Americans respond? This lesson lets the two best-known answers speak in their own words, and then turns to the women who refused to choose between them.

Washington in his own words

Washington told his audience that Black Southerners had to build an economic foundation first. He told the story of a ship lost at sea whose crew begged another ship for water. The answer came back: "Cast down your bucket where you are." They did, and found fresh water, for they were at the mouth of a great river. For Black Southerners, that meant farming, trades, business and the professions in the South, not hopes of a better life elsewhere. He went on:

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

On rights, he chose his words for a white Southern audience. He called "the agitation of questions of social equality" the "extremest folly." Yet he added: "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges."

Public words were only part of Washington's record. The National Park Service notes that he had to keep a conservative public stance to remain acceptable to white Americans. Even so, he wrote to the legislatures of Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana protesting disfranchisement, and in 1915 he publicly criticized the film The Birth of a Nation. In the early 1900s he also secretly gave his own money, and raised more from white supporters, for lawsuits. They challenged unfair labor contracts, voting restrictions and segregated public facilities.

The upshot: Washington's public program was economic self-help and patience on civil rights, aimed at a white South that held power over Black lives; privately, he paid for some of the legal challenges he would not make in public.

Du Bois in his own words

Du Bois, a scholar who would later edit the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, set out a different diagnosis in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It begins with a warning:

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

He described what living behind that line did to the mind. Black Americans, he wrote, saw themselves through the eyes of a contemptuous world:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.

In a chapter on Washington, Du Bois argued that the Tuskegee leader had asked Black Americans to give up three things for the present. They were political power, insistence on civil rights and the higher education of Black youth. In return, Du Bois wrote, they had received disfranchisement, a legal status of civil inferiority and the steady withdrawal of support from Black colleges. He asked instead for "The right to vote," "Civic equality" and "The education of youth according to ability." He pointed out that Tuskegee itself depended on teachers trained in Black colleges, which had produced over 500 graduates in the South in 1895-1900 alone. He wanted that educated leadership, which he called the "Talented Tenth," to have "the key to knowledge."

Du Bois did not reject Washington entirely. "So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses," he wrote, "we must hold up his hands and strive with him." But where Washington apologized for injustice or played down the vote, "we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them."

New organizations

Du Bois's program took shape in organizations. In 1905 he helped launch the Niagara Movement for civil rights. Then, in 1908, a deadly race riot in Springfield, Illinois, moved a group of white liberals to call a meeting on racial justice. Among them were Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard. About sixty people signed the call, released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth, 12 February 1909. Seven of them were African American, including Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. Out of that call came the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. According to the NAACP, its aim was to secure the rights promised in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The upshot: Du Bois diagnosed the color line and double consciousness, demanded the vote, civic equality and higher education, and helped build organizations of open protest, from the Niagara Movement to the interracial NAACP.

The women who refused the binary

The Washington-Du Bois debate is often told as a duel between two men. Black women had already moved past its terms. Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery, became principal of the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. Later she earned a doctorate in history from the University of Paris, the fourth African American woman to earn a doctorate. In A Voice from the South (1892), she argued that the progress of Black women was the measure of the whole race's progress:

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me."

Cooper also faulted Black men who, she wrote, were "thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject" but dropped back into "sixteenth century logic" on "the woman question." On schooling she took both sides of the later quarrel: practical education for most students, and the humanities for those with special aptitude.

Mary Church Terrell, born in Memphis in 1863 to formerly enslaved parents, studied at Oberlin College and taught at the same M Street School. According to the National Women's History Museum, her activism began in 1892, when an old friend, Thomas Moss, was lynched in Memphis (Lesson 18). She believed in racial uplift, and her words "Lifting as we climb" became the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, which she helped found in 1896 and led until 1901. But uplift never meant silence. She signed the NAACP's founding call, picketed the White House for woman suffrage, and in 1950, at 86, led a protest against a segregated restaurant in Washington. The case ended in 1953 with a court ruling that segregated eating places in the capital were unconstitutional.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, too, criticized both men. According to the historian Miriam DeCosta-Willis, she wrote against Washington and later distanced herself from the NAACP because of differences with Du Bois over strategy.

The upshot: Cooper, Terrell and Wells joined uplift and protest instead of choosing between them, and insisted that the advancement of Black women was central to the advancement of the race.

Common misconceptions

• Washington simply accepted segregation and did nothing for civil rights. He urged patience in public, but protested disfranchisement to Southern legislatures and secretly paid for lawsuits against discrimination.
• Du Bois opposed industrial education. He supported common schools and industrial training "for the masses" but insisted on higher education and the vote as well.
• The debate had only two sides, and both were men. Cooper, Terrell and Wells offered their own programs that joined uplift, protest and women's rights.
• The NAACP was founded by Black leaders alone. It grew from a call issued in 1909 by white liberals; seven of the roughly sixty signers were African American.
• "Double consciousness" means having two personalities. Du Bois meant the strain of seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous world while striving to be both American and Black.

Pulling it together

• On 18 September 1895 Booker T. Washington told the Atlanta Exposition that the races could be "separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand"; Du Bois called it the "Atlanta Compromise."
• Washington put economic progress first and urged patience in public, while privately funding lawsuits against discrimination.
• In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois named the color line and double consciousness and demanded the vote, civic equality and education according to ability.
• The Niagara Movement (1905) and the NAACP (1909) organized open protest; the NAACP grew from an interracial call after the Springfield riot of 1908.
• Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell and the National Association of Colored Women (1896, "Lifting as we climb") joined uplift with protest and made Black women's progress central.

Sources

1. Washington, B. T. (1901). The Atlanta Exposition address. In Up from slavery: An autobiography (chap. 14). Doubleday, Page. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. National Park Service. (2020). Booker T. Washington. Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site. nps.gov
3. National Park Service. (2015). Protest. Booker T. Washington National Monument. nps.gov
4. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of black folk. A. C. McClurg. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
5. NAACP. (n.d.). Our history. naacp.org
6. Cooper, A. J. (1892). A voice from the South. Aldine Printing House. Documenting the American South. docsouth.unc.edu
7. Leiter, A. (n.d.). Summary of A voice from the South. Documenting the American South. docsouth.unc.edu
8. National Park Service. (2022). Mary Church Terrell. nps.gov
9. National Women's History Museum. (n.d.). Mary Church Terrell. womenshistory.org
10. DeCosta-Willis, M. (2017, updated 2018). Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Tennessee Encyclopedia. tennesseeencyclopedia.net

A week for Black history, February 1926

In February 1926, a historian in Washington, D.C., sent out a press release. Carter G. Woodson announced that the second week of the month would be Negro History Week. The timing was deliberate. Since the 1890s, according to the National Park Service, Black communities had celebrated the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on 12 February and Frederick Douglass on 14 February. Woodson respected both men, but he wanted Americans to learn about many more Black men and women. Each year he and his co-workers sent out pictures, lesson plans for teachers, scripts for historical plays and posters of important dates and people. Schools formed Negro history clubs.

Woodson was answering a problem he had noticed as a young scholar. The public knew very little about African Americans' part in the nation's history, and schools did not teach it. This lesson follows how Black Americans built institutions to change that, and to educate themselves: a scholarly association, colleges of their own, community schools across the South, and fraternities and sororities that bound educated young people together.

The education of Carter G. Woodson

Woodson's own education shows what it took. He was born on 19 December 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, the fourth of nine children of parents who had been enslaved. As a young man he mined coal in the New River Gorge of West Virginia to help support his family. Only at twenty had he saved enough to enter high school, and he finished in two years. He earned degrees from Berea College in Kentucky and the University of Chicago, and in 1912 a PhD in history from Harvard University. He was the second Black American, after W. E. B. Du Bois, to earn a Harvard PhD. As principal of Washington's Armstrong Manual Training School from 1914, he stressed both vocational and liberal arts education, joining the two sides of the debate in Lesson 19.

On 9 September 1915 Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In 1916 he started The Journal of Negro History. In 1921 he founded a publishing company, the Associated Publishers, to print the work of Black scholars and of women writing on African and African American history, work that other publishers would not take. In 1937 he added the Negro History Bulletin for schools. He also lived through the violence he wrote about. On 20 July 1919, during the Red Summer, he watched a white mob seize and kill a Black man on Pennsylvania Avenue, and barely escaped himself.

Woodson trained a generation of historians, among them Charles H. Wesley, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, Rayford W. Logan and John Hope Franklin. Unlike most male scholars of his time, the Park Service notes, he welcomed Black women as equal co-workers and leaders. In 1936 the educator Mary McLeod Bethune became the Association's president, its first woman president and the longest serving, until 1952.

Worth holding on to: Woodson made Black history a field of research and a subject of teaching, building an association, a journal, a press and a yearly observance, with Black teachers and communities as his partners.

Colleges of their own

Black colleges came first. According to the National Park Service's study of Reconstruction, many of today's historically Black colleges and universities date to that era. Missionary associations, working with local Black activists and sometimes with state governments, founded Fisk, Shaw, Hampton, Tougaloo, Morehouse, Spelman, Tuskegee and Howard, and all of them made the training of teachers a priority. Black churches were often the cradle. Atlanta's Friendship Baptist Church, founded in 1862 by formerly enslaved people, was the birthplace of Atlanta University, Morehouse and Spelman. Many early Black colleges were founded to welcome students of all races, but soon became Black in practice. Because discrimination shut Black workers out of many trades and professions, teaching became one of the surest paths upward.

Today the federal government defines an HBCU as an institution founded before 1964 whose principal mission was the education of Black Americans. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 99 HBCUs in 2022, in 19 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands; 50 were public and 49 private. They enrolled about 289,000 students, and 24 percent of them were not Black. They educated about 9 percent of all Black college students.

Schooling for younger children was just as hard to win. Between 1917 and 1932, a building program begun by Booker T. Washington and the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, put up 5,357 schools, shops and teachers' homes for Black communities across the South. By 1928, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Rosenwald schools served one-third of the South's rural Black schoolchildren and teachers.

Worth holding on to: HBCUs, many founded in Reconstruction with Black churches and activists as partners, trained the teachers and professionals of a segregated nation and remain a distinct part of American higher education.

Brotherhoods and sisterhoods

College students built their own networks too. On 4 December 1906, seven students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, founded Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African American men. According to the fraternity, it began as a study and support group for students who faced racial prejudice. On 15 January 1908, at Howard University, Ethel Hedgemon Lyle and eight other women founded Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest of today's major Black sororities. More followed, and in 1930 they formed the National Pan-Hellenic Council at Howard University. Its nine members, often called the Divine Nine, are listed below with their founding years.

The council describes their shared commitment as leadership, scholarship, service and community impact. For generations of Black college graduates, these organizations have been networks for service, mentoring and civic work long after graduation.

From a week to a month

Negro History Week grew. In 1969, according to the National Park Service, leaders of the Black United Students at Kent State University proposed expanding it to a month, and in 1976 the expansion took place. On 10 February 1976 President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to observe Black History Month:

But, even more than this, we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.

Even official sources need checking. Ford's message said that Woodson had founded his association "One hundred years ago," but the National Park Service dates the founding to 1915, sixty-one years earlier. Woodson, who insisted on evidence, would have noticed. Today his office-home at 1538 Ninth Street NW in Washington, where the Association had its headquarters, is a National Historic Site.

Worth holding on to: Black History Month began as a Black scholar's project in 1926 and became a national observance in 1976; it was built from the bottom up by teachers, students and communities.

Common misconceptions

• The federal government created Black History Month in 1976. Woodson's Association began Negro History Week in 1926; students at Kent State proposed a month in 1969, and the President endorsed it in 1976.
• February was chosen because it is the shortest month. Woodson chose the week of Lincoln's and Douglass's birthdays, which Black communities had celebrated since the 1890s.
• HBCUs were founded only by Black people and only for Black students. Many began with missionary associations working alongside Black activists and churches and welcomed all races; today about a quarter of HBCU students are not Black.
• Black Greek-letter organizations are only social clubs. Alpha Phi Alpha began as a study and support group against prejudice, and the council stresses scholarship and service.
• Black history became a field only in the 1960s. Woodson's journal began in 1916, and Schomburg's essay of 1925 (Lesson 1) belongs to the same movement.

What you now know

• Carter G. Woodson, son of formerly enslaved parents and a former coal miner, earned a Harvard PhD in 1912 and co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on 9 September 1915.
• He began The Journal of Negro History (1916), the Associated Publishers (1921), Negro History Week (1926) and the Negro History Bulletin (1937); Mary McLeod Bethune led the Association from 1936 to 1952.
• Many HBCUs, from Shaw (1865) and Howard (1867) to Spelman and Tuskegee (1881), began in Reconstruction; in 2022 there were 99, enrolling about 289,000 students.
• Rosenwald schools served a third of the rural South's Black schoolchildren by 1928.
• Alpha Phi Alpha (1906) and Alpha Kappa Alpha (1908) led the way for the nine organizations of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (1930).

Sources

1. National Park Service. (2025). Carter G. Woodson. nps.gov
2. National Park Service. (2023). African American History Month. African Burial Ground National Monument. nps.gov
3. National Park Service. (n.d.). Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site. nps.gov
4. Ford, G. R. (1976, February 10). Message on the observance of Black History Month. In Key speeches and writings of Gerald R. Ford. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. fordlibrarymuseum.gov
5. Downs, G. P., & Masur, K. (2017). The era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900: A National Historic Landmarks theme study. National Park Service. nps.gov
6. National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Fast facts: Historically Black colleges and universities. U.S. Department of Education. nces.ed.gov
7. National Trust for Historic Preservation. (n.d.). Rosenwald schools. savingplaces.org
8. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. (n.d.). Our history. apa1906.net
9. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. (n.d.). Our history. aka1908.com
10. National Pan-Hellenic Council. (n.d.). About us. nphchq.com

Letters to Chicago, 1917

In the spring of 1917, letters poured into Chicago from across the South. Many began the same way: their writers had read about jobs in the Chicago Defender, a Black weekly newspaper, and wanted to know more. On 23 April 1917 a laborer in Dallas, Texas, wrote that he had worked five years for a structural shop and three for a meatpacking company. "I am 31 yrs. old have a very industrious wife, no children. If chances are available for work of any kind let me know." From Lexington, Mississippi, a young teacher who had studied at Alcorn College explained why he wanted to leave:

I am compelled to teach 150 children without any assistance and receives only $27.00 a month, the white with 30 get $100.

Another writer, a father of five, wanted to "buy a good home near good Schools good Churchs." He had heard talk of "a free train May 15." Women wrote too. A mother in Greenwood, Mississippi, said she was "very anxious to leave the South on account of my children."

These letters survive because researchers working under the direction of Emmett J. Scott collected them, and Carter G. Woodson's Journal of Negro History (Lesson 20) published them in 1919. They show that the move north was made one family at a time, by people weighing wages, schools, safety and the chance to be treated as human beings. This lesson compares three movements of the same years: Black Southerners going north and west, Black Caribbeans coming to American cities, and the mass movement Marcus Garvey built among both.

The Defender and the Great Northern Drive

Robert S. Abbott founded the Chicago Defender on 5 May 1905. According to the National Park Service and PBS, it became the first Black newspaper with a circulation over 100,000, and two-thirds of its readers lived outside Chicago. Because white distributors refused to carry it, and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan threatened its readers, it was smuggled into the South by Black Pullman railroad porters and entertainers. Each copy was passed hand to hand and read aloud in barbershops and churches, so that perhaps 500,000 people read it each week.

The Defender told readers what the South would not: the truth about lynching, the jobs open in the North, and the train schedules to get there. It declared 15 May 1917 the date of a "Great Northern Drive." PBS reports that at least 110,000 Black migrants came to Chicago between 1916 and 1918, nearly tripling the city's Black population.

The core of it: A Black-owned newspaper, carried south by Black railroad workers, gave Southern readers the information and the encouragement to move, and the migrants' own letters show how carefully they decided.

The Great Migration in numbers

According to the Census Bureau, an estimated six million Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970. Historians divide the movement into two waves. In the first, from 1910 to 1940, migrants went mostly to Northern and Midwestern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York and Philadelphia. The First World War opened factory jobs when European immigration slowed and white workers went to war. The National Archives estimates that about two million Black people left the South between the two world wars. In the second wave, during and after the Second World War, about three million more left within twenty years, many of them going west to Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

The North was not a promised land. Migrants met the Red Summer of 1919 (Lesson 18), and the National Archives notes that in the second wave restrictive covenants and redlining confined Black families to segregated neighborhoods, a foundation of today's racial gaps in wealth. Still, the migration changed American politics and culture. It made cities such as Chicago and New York centers of Black life, and Harlem the setting for the Renaissance of Lesson 22.

From the islands: Caribbean migration

A second migration ran alongside the first. BlackPast, an online reference on Black history, notes that between 1881 and 1915 more than 250,000 Caribbean laborers, mostly men, went to Central America, many to build the Panama Canal. Many of them later came to the United States. Others came from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Martinique, Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic; Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders were already U.S. citizens. By 1930 an estimated 100,000 Black migrants from the Caribbean lived in the United States, mostly in New York, South Florida and Massachusetts, and like Southern migrants they sought factory jobs between 1915 and 1940.

Caribbean-born writers and activists became central to Black New York. The collector Arturo Schomburg had come from Puerto Rico (Lesson 1). The poet Claude McKay, born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in 1889, published his first book in Kingston in 1912 before coming to the United States. And a Jamaican printer would build the largest mass movement in Black history.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

Marcus Garvey was born on 17 August 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica. According to the Marcus Garvey Papers project at the University of California, Los Angeles, he left school at 14, worked as a printer and traveled in Central America and London. Admiring Tuskegee, he hoped to open a similar school in Jamaica, and in 1916 he came to the United States at Booker T. Washington's invitation, arriving just after Washington's death. In New York he organized a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he had founded in Jamaica.

The UNIA grew fast. Its weekly newspaper, the Negro World, was soon banned in parts of Africa and the Caribbean. In 1919 the UNIA incorporated the Black Star Line, a shipping company meant to link Black people in America, the Caribbean and Africa through trade. By 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of chapters worldwide, and in August 1920 it opened an international convention in New York's Madison Square Garden.

Garvey's message was pride and self-reliance on a world scale. In his words:

For five years the Universal Negro Improvement Association has been advocating the cause of Africa for the Africans--that is, that the Negro peoples of the world should concentrate upon the object of building up for themselves a great nation in Africa.

He saw himself as building on Washington, not rejecting him: "The new ideal includes the program of Booker T. Washington and has gone much further." The New Negro, he wrote, sought "not industrial opportunity alone, but a political voice." He even taught his followers to see God through their own eyes, to "worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia." The UCLA project calls Garvey the leader of "the largest organized mass movement in black history" and a forerunner of the modern "black is beautiful" ideal.

His critics were fierce, and they had reasons. The editors of the Garvey Papers describe how, from 1921, Garvey turned to a doctrine of "racial purity" and courted white separatists, including the Ku Klux Klan. In May 1924 Du Bois wrote in The Crisis that Garvey was "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world." The Black Star Line, meanwhile, was ruined by costly repairs, unhappy crews, mismanagement and corruption. In 1922 the federal government indicted Garvey for mail fraud in its stock promotions. He was convicted and imprisoned; his sentence was later commuted, and in 1927 he was deported to Jamaica. He died in London in 1940.

The core of it: Southern and Caribbean migrants remade Black America's cities, and Garvey turned their hopes into the largest Black mass movement yet, joining race pride and Pan-African ambition with a business empire that collapsed.

Common misconceptions

• The Great Migration happened all at once after the First World War. It lasted from about 1910 to 1970, in two waves, and moved about six million people.
• Migrants found equality in the North. They escaped Jim Crow law but met riots, job discrimination, restrictive covenants and redlining.
• All Black Americans in the 1920s were Southern-born. About 100,000 Black Caribbean migrants lived in the United States by 1930, and leaders such as Garvey, Schomburg and McKay came from the islands.
• Garvey simply wanted every Black American to move to Africa. His UNIA stressed race pride, Black business and building a strong Black nation in Africa as a power for the whole diaspora.
• Garvey was admired by all Black leaders. Du Bois and others attacked his methods, his business dealings and his contacts with white separatists.

The takeaway

• Letters of 1917, collected under Emmett J. Scott and published in 1919, show migrants weighing wages, schools, safety and family.
• The Chicago Defender, founded in 1905, was carried south by Pullman porters and declared 15 May 1917 the "Great Northern Drive"; Chicago's Black population nearly tripled between 1916 and 1918.
• About six million Black Southerners left the South between 1910 and 1970, first for Northern and Midwestern cities and later for the West.
• About 100,000 Black Caribbean migrants lived in the United States by 1930, many in New York.
• Marcus Garvey's UNIA preached "Africa for the Africans" and race pride, built the Black Star Line, and was undone by business failure, conflict with critics such as Du Bois and his conviction and deportation in 1927.

Sources

1. Scott, E. J. (Ed.). (1919). Letters of Negro migrants of 1916-1918. The Journal of Negro History, 4(3). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). Robert Abbott. Fort Frederica National Monument. nps.gov
3. PBS. (1998). The Chicago Defender. The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords. pbs.org
4. U.S. Census Bureau. (2012). The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970. census.gov
5. National Archives. (2021). The Great Migration (1910-1970). African American Heritage. archives.gov
6. BlackPast. (n.d.). West Indian immigration to the United States (1900- ). blackpast.org
7. Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). Claude McKay. poets.org
8. Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project. (n.d.). Marcus Garvey: An overview. University of California, Los Angeles. international.ucla.edu
9. Hill, R. A. (n.d.). Introduction to the American series, Volume I. Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project, UCLA. international.ucla.edu
10. Garvey, M. (1923). Philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey (A. Jacques Garvey, Comp.). Universal Publishing House. Internet Archive. archive.org
11. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1924, May). A lunatic or a traitor. The Crisis, 28(1). Internet Archive. archive.org

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, March 1925

In March 1925 the magazine Survey Graphic put a single word in large type on its cover: HARLEM. Underneath it read "Mecca of the New Negro." The editors explained that they had given earlier special issues to the new Ireland, the new Russia and the newly awakened Mexico. Now, they wrote, "such a dramatic flowering of a new race-spirit is taking place close at home--among American Negroes, and the stage of that new episode is Harlem." They credited the issue's concept to Alain Locke, a graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Berlin and a professor of philosophy at Howard University.

The issue was a showcase. James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote on the making of Harlem. W. E. B. Du Bois and the collector Arturo Schomburg contributed essays, and W. A. Domingo wrote on Caribbean New York in "The Tropics in New York." Under the heading "Youth Speaks" came poems by Countee Cullen, Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. The artist Winold Reiss drew portraits of Harlem residents. Later that year Locke expanded the issue into a book, The New Negro, with drawings and designs by the artist Aaron Douglas. In its opening essay Locke described the old way white America had seen Black people:

So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being--a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be "kept down," or "in his place," or "helped up," to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.

The New Negro, Locke argued, would speak for himself. This lesson reads two of the movement's poems closely, then looks at its pictures and performances, asking in each case how artists claimed the right to define Black life, and how they disagreed about it.

Five steps for reading a poem closely

1. Hear the speaker. Read the poem aloud and ask who is speaking, and to whom.
2. Mark the images. List the places, times and pictures the poem uses.
3. Notice the form. Look at line length, rhyme and repetition, and ask how they shape the feeling.
4. Connect to the context. Ask what the poem says about identity in its own time, using earlier lessons.
5. Compare. Set the poem beside another and ask what each sees that the other does not.

Step by step: Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921)

Langston Hughes's poem first appeared in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by Du Bois, in June 1921. Here it is complete:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The speaker. The "I" is not one person but a whole people, alive across thousands of years. The images. Four rivers trace a history: the Euphrates of the earliest cities, the Congo of Central Africa, the Nile of the pyramid builders, and the Mississippi of American slavery. The poem places Abe Lincoln on that river, and its muddy water turns "golden in the sunset," a hint of hope after suffering. The form. The poem is in free verse, without rhyme, and its long lines move like water; the refrain "My soul has grown deep like the rivers" returns like a current. The context. Against the image of Africa as a land without history, Hughes makes Africa and its diaspora builders of civilization from the start, the same claim Schomburg made in Lesson 1.

Step by step: Cullen, "Heritage" (1925)

Countee Cullen's "Heritage" appeared in the same Survey Graphic issue and in The New Negro. It opens with a question it keeps asking:

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

The speaker. Here the "I" is one modern man, "three centuries removed," who knows Africa only as "A book one thumbs / Listlessly, till slumber comes." The images. His Africa is built from jungle scenes, wild animals and pounding drums, pictures closer to Western storybooks than to the cities of Mali or Kongo. A careful reader should notice that the poem borrows these stereotypes even as it tests them.

The form. Tight rhymed couplets in short, regular lines hold down the drumbeat the speaker says he hears, so the form acts out his struggle to "Quench my pride and cool my blood." The context. Near the end the conflict turns religious. A Christian, he admits, "Do I not play a double part?" and confesses, "Lord, I fashion dark gods, too," wishing that the Christ he serves were Black. The "double part" recalls Du Bois's double consciousness from Lesson 19.

So what? Harlem Renaissance poets did not share one picture of Africa: Hughes claimed it as the deep root of a proud history, while Cullen showed how hard it was to know an ancestral home seen through distance, stereotype and a divided self.

Pictures

Lesson 14 showed that photographs were arguments. In Harlem, the photographer James Van Der Zee, born in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1886, made the argument with everyday life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds many of his prints. One, from 1928, shows three men holding copies of the Chicago Defender beside the paper's news truck. Another, from 1929, shows tea time at the beauty salon of Madam C. J. Walker. His camera recorded Black Harlem as its residents saw themselves: working, reading, doing business and dressing well. Painters and illustrators made a similar claim. Aaron Douglas's drawings and designs for The New Negro, and Winold Reiss's portraits of Harlem people, presented Black faces and Black history as subjects of art.

Performances

Music was the Renaissance's widest voice. Locke wrote in The New Negro that "The Spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America." The journalist J. A. Rogers opened his essay "Jazz at Home" with a line that still describes the music:

Jazz is a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home.

The stage was contested ground. In The New Negro, the essayist Montgomery Gregory praised the stars of hit musicals such as Shuffle Along. Among them were the songwriters Sissle and Blake and the performer Florence Mills. Yet he judged that these shows, for all their advances, "fundamentally they carry-on the old minstrel tradition." He pointed instead to serious drama, such as Paul Robeson's performances in The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings.

Film joined in. In 1935 Duke Ellington and his orchestra made Symphony in Black, a one-reel short filmed at Paramount's Astoria studio on Long Island. According to the film historian J. B. Kaufman, it sets Ellington's "A Rhapsody of Negro Life" to images in four movements: "The Laborers," "A Triangle," "A Hymn of Sorrow" and "Harlem Rhythm." In the second, a young Billie Holiday makes a brief, unbilled appearance as a spurned lover. In about nine minutes the film moves from labor and heartbreak to grief and, finally, to dance.

So what? In photographs, drawings, music, theater and film, Black artists of the 1920s and 1930s claimed control of their own image, and argued among themselves about which images told the truth.

Common misconceptions

• The Harlem Renaissance belonged only to Harlem. Locke presented "the New Negro in a national and even international scope," and Caribbean-born figures such as McKay and Schomburg were central to it.
• Its writers agreed on how to picture Africa. Hughes and Cullen offered very different Africas, and Cullen's poem leans on stereotypes it also questions.
• Black intellectuals looked down on spirituals and jazz. Locke called the spirituals the most characteristic product of the race's genius, and Rogers celebrated jazz.
• It was a movement of men. Anne Spencer and Angelina Grimke wrote poems for the Survey Graphic issue, Jessie Fauset contributed to The New Negro, and Florence Mills and Billie Holiday were among its performers.
• Its photographs only documented suffering. James Van Der Zee's pictures show businesses, schools, salons and celebrations in a confident Black community.

Recap

• Survey Graphic's March 1925 issue, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," conceived by Alain Locke, grew into the anthology The New Negro (1925).
• Locke argued that the Negro had been "more of a formula than a human being" in white America's mind, and that the New Negro would define himself.
• Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (The Crisis, June 1921) claims Africa as the deep root of a proud history; Cullen's "Heritage" (1925) asks "What is Africa to me?" and dramatizes a divided self.
• James Van Der Zee photographed Harlem life, and Aaron Douglas and Winold Reiss illustrated the movement.
• Spirituals, jazz, stage musicals and Ellington's Symphony in Black (1935) carried Black art to wide audiences, while critics such as Montgomery Gregory debated the minstrel legacy.

Sources

1. Survey Graphic. (1925, March 1). Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro [Special issue], 53(11). Internet Archive. archive.org
2. Locke, A. (Ed.). (1925). The new Negro: An interpretation. Albert and Charles Boni. Internet Archive. archive.org
3. Hughes, L. (1921, June). The Negro speaks of rivers. The Crisis, 22(2), 71. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. Cullen, C. (1925). Heritage. In A. Locke (Ed.), The new Negro (pp. 250-253). Albert and Charles Boni.
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). James Van Der Zee: Chicago Defender news truck with three men holding papers [Gelatin silver print, 1928]. metmuseum.org
6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). James Van Der Zee: Tea time at Madam C. J. Walker's beauty salon [Gelatin silver print, 1929]. metmuseum.org
7. Kaufman, J. B. (2016, July). Symphony in Black (1935). Movie of the Month. jbkaufman.com

Manchester, October 1945

From 15 to 21 October 1945, delegates gathered in Chorlton Town Hall in Manchester, England, for the Fifth Pan-African Congress. The Second World War had ended only months before. W. E. B. Du Bois chaired the congress. He later said that the Trinidad-born organizer George Padmore was its "organising spirit." Among the delegates were future leaders of new nations: Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Hastings Banda of Nyasaland. Obafemi Awolowo came from Nigeria. Many delegates came from trade unions and workers' associations in Africa and the Caribbean, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Lesson 21) sent a representative. Delegates from French-speaking colonies were absent, and South Africa's delegates could not get passports.

The congress issued a "Challenge to the Colonial Powers." It said the delegates believed in peace, but warned that if the West kept ruling by force, Africans might as a last resort have to answer with force. It declared, "We are determined to be free," and demanded for Black Africa autonomy and independence. A second declaration called on colonial workers, farmers and intellectuals to organize, naming the strike and the boycott as their weapons.

Within fifteen years, according to the State Department's Office of the Historian, three dozen new states in Asia and Africa won autonomy or independence. On 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast became independent Ghana, under Nkrumah. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King traveled to the ceremony at Nkrumah's invitation. The King Institute notes that King saw a strong parallel between resistance to colonialism in Africa and the struggle against racism at home. This lesson traces the ideas behind such moments. They include Negritude among French-speaking Black writers, Negrismo in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and the Pan-African politics that met in Manchester.

Negritude: Paris in the 1930s

According to the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Negritude began as a revolt against French colonialism and racism. Its founders were three Black students who met in Paris around 1931: Aime Cesaire from Martinique, Leon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and Leopold Sedar Senghor from Senegal. As colonial subjects, all three had been taught that their peoples were uncivilized and needed French guidance. In Paris, their friendship joined Africa and the African diaspora.

They did not start from nothing. Three sisters from Martinique, Jane, Paulette and Andree Nardal, ran a salon in Paris. There the students met Harlem writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and they admired Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (Lesson 22). Jane Nardal's article "Internationalisme noir" (Black internationalism) appeared in 1928, more than ten years before Senghor's first major theoretical essay. Diagne notes that later accounts long played down the Nardal sisters' role; Paulette Nardal complained bitterly in 1960 of being erased from the story.

The movement is usually dated to the student journal L'Etudiant noir (The Black Student) of 1934-1935. It was then that Cesaire coined the word negritude. He deliberately turned around the French word "negre," which had become a racist slur, and made it a name for a shared Black consciousness. Damas published his poems Pigments in 1937, and Cesaire finished his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in 1939. In 1948 Senghor published an anthology of new Black poetry in French. Negritude, in Diagne's summary, was the self-affirmation of Black peoples and of the values of the Black world.

Negritude was also politics. In 1946 Cesaire became mayor of Fort-de-France and a deputy in the French National Assembly. Senghor was elected a deputy for Senegal the same year, and Damas joined them as deputy for French Guiana in 1948. In 1956 Cesaire resigned from the French Communist Party, arguing that Black peoples needed organizations of their own. Senghor led Senegal to independence in 1960 and served as its president for twenty years. Critics charged that Negritude treated race as a fixed essence, and some said it offered cultural pride in place of real economic independence.

Key idea: Negritude turned an insult into a banner. Inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and by thinkers such as the Nardal sisters, its founders affirmed a shared Black world, and its poets became political leaders.

Negrismo: Havana and San Juan

In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, poets in the 1920s and 1930s brought African and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, words and folklore into Spanish verse. The movement became known as Negrismo. According to the Academy of American Poets, the Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales Matos began this work with "Pueblo Negro" (Black town) in 1926. In 1937 he collected such poems in Tuntun de pasa y griferia. That book, with the work of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, made him a founder of Negrismo. Pales Matos was white, and his poems drew criticism for appropriating African elements.

Guillen, born in Camaguey, Cuba, in 1902, published Motivos de son in 1930, poems built on the rhythms of Cuban popular song. It was praised as a masterpiece. In later books such as West Indies Ltd (1934) he wrote more openly about oppression in Cuba. He became known as Cuba's national poet, and in 1948 Langston Hughes and Ben F. Carruthers published the first English translations of his poems. Like Negritude, Negrismo placed Black culture at the center of a national culture that had pushed it to the margins.

Key idea: In three languages, Black writers of the 1920s and 1930s rejected the claim that their cultures were inferior. Their ideas fed the movements that ended colonial rule.

From culture to independence

The Manchester congress linked these cultural movements to mass politics. Its declarations spoke for workers and farmers as well as intellectuals. Within a dozen years Nkrumah led Ghana to independence, and within fifteen Senghor led Senegal. The Office of the Historian notes that the United Nations grew from 35 member states in 1946 to 127 by 1970 as new nations joined. These states became vocal advocates of further decolonization. African Americans watched closely. King's journey to Accra in 1957, a year after the Montgomery bus boycott, showed how the freedom struggles of Africa and Black America were coming to be seen as one.

Common misconceptions

• Negritude simply copied the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem writers inspired its founders, but Negritude grew from French colonial rule and the memory of slavery in the Caribbean and built its own philosophy.
• These were movements of men. Jane and Paulette Nardal helped shape Negritude's ideas before the men who became famous for it, and women such as Alma La Badie of the UNIA sat among the Manchester delegates.
• Negrismo was written only by Afro-Caribbean poets. Its founders included the white Puerto Rican Pales Matos, whose work was criticized as appropriation.
• Pan-Africanism meant moving everyone to Africa. The Manchester congress demanded self-government and independence for colonies and rights for their workers.
• African independence had nothing to do with the U.S. civil rights movement. Du Bois chaired the Manchester congress, and King traveled to Ghana's independence ceremony in 1957.

Where this leaves us

• The Fifth Pan-African Congress (Manchester, 15-21 October 1945), chaired by Du Bois and organized by Padmore, demanded autonomy and independence for Black Africa.
• Negritude began among Cesaire, Damas and Senghor in Paris in the 1930s, building on the Nardal sisters and the Harlem Renaissance; Cesaire coined the word by reclaiming a slur.
• Negrismo, led by Nicolas Guillen and Luis Pales Matos, brought Afro-Caribbean rhythms into Spanish verse.
• Ghana became independent on 6 March 1957 and Senegal in 1960; three dozen new states emerged in Asia and Africa between 1945 and 1960.
• King's trip to Ghana in 1957 linked African independence with the U.S. civil rights struggle.

Sources

1. Padmore, G. (Ed.). (1947). Colonial and coloured unity: A programme of action. History of the Pan-African Congress. Hammersmith Bookshop. Marxists Internet Archive. marxists.org
2. Office of the Historian. (n.d.). Decolonization of Asia and Africa, 1945-1960. U.S. Department of State. history.state.gov
3. Office of the Historian. (n.d.). Ghana. A guide to the United States' history of recognition, diplomatic, and consular relations. history.state.gov
4. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Ghana trip. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
5. Diagne, S. B. (2010, rev. 2023). Negritude. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. plato.stanford.edu
6. Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). Luis Pales Matos. poets.org
7. Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). Nicolas Guillen. poets.org

"Half-American," January 1942

In January 1942, weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a 26-year-old Black man in Wichita, Kansas, wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's leading Black newspapers. Wichita was a center of military aircraft production. Yet the National Park Service notes that as of April 1942 the city's four aircraft plants hired only about 150 Black workers. Cessna at first hired Black workers only as janitors or in similar unskilled jobs. Shut out of the factory floor, James G. Thompson worked in the cafeteria at Cessna. His letter, printed on 31 January, carried a title that named the problem: "Should I Sacrifice to Live 'Half-American'?"

Thompson proposed a double victory: over the enemies abroad and over racism at home. The Courier made it a national campaign, with a "Double V" logo of two Vs topped by an eagle, and soon hired Thompson to direct it. The campaign spread through Black community life. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum lists Double V baseball games, gardens, war bond drives, beauty pageants and even a hairstyle, the "Doubler." According to the National Park Service, the campaign helped the Courier pass the Chicago Defender as the country's leading Black newspaper, with a national circulation of nearly 200,000. Not everyone welcomed it. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to censor Black journalists and branded support for the campaign seditious. Thompson himself enlisted in the Army in February 1943.

Thompson's question frames this lesson. Black Americans were asked to fight for democracy abroad while being denied it at home. What did they win by fighting, and what did the government's postwar programs give back to them?

Jobs: the threat of a march, 1941

The fight began before Pearl Harbor. As defense factories hired millions of workers in 1941, Black workers who moved to Northern and Western cities often met violence and discrimination. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, met with Eleanor Roosevelt and members of the cabinet. He presented a list of grievances and demanded an executive order against job discrimination in the defense industry. According to the National Archives, he and other leaders threatened to bring tens of thousands of Black marchers to the White House lawn if their demands were not met.

On 25 June 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802:

There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries and in Government, because of race, creed, color, or national origin.

It was the first presidential directive on race since Reconstruction. It set up a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints, though the National Archives notes that most historians have judged the committee powerless, especially in the South. Randolph called off the march. Twenty-two years later he would be a driving force behind the 1963 March on Washington.

Service: a segregated military

According to the National Archives, more than one million of the 2.5 million Black men who registered for the draft were inducted into the armed forces. Thousands of Black women served as well. They served in a segregated military. The Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Black soldiers lived in separate and substandard housing and received inferior training and equipment. They were placed in support and service units and could not command white soldiers.

Some Black Americans won combat roles. At Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama, the Army Air Corps ran what the National Park Service calls a military test of whether African Americans could be trained to fly combat aircraft. The first Black military pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, trained there and later became known as the "Red Tails."

Pressure continued after the war. In December 1946 President Harry S. Truman appointed a civil rights panel. Its 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, proposed laws against lynching and poll taxes and a permanent FEPC. When Southern senators threatened a filibuster, Truman used his executive power instead. On 26 July 1948 he signed Executive Order 9981. It declared that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." The military resisted, but by the end of the Korean War almost all of it was integrated.

The point: Black Americans did not wait for equality to be handed to them. The threat of a march won Executive Order 8802, the Double V campaign kept up the pressure, and after the war Truman ordered equal treatment in the armed forces.

The G.I. Bill: equal on paper

On 22 June 1944, Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill. The National Archives reports that within seven years about eight million veterans received educational benefits, 2.3 million of them at colleges and universities. By 1955 the Veterans Administration had backed 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion, and veterans bought 20 percent of all new homes built after the war. The law's terms did not mention race. More than a million Black veterans were eligible.

The benefits were administered locally, however, and the home loans themselves came from banks. The National Archives notes that Black veterans often could not get mortgages in Black neighborhoods and were largely shut out of white suburbs. The political scientist Ira Katznelson found that of the 3,229 G.I. Bill-guaranteed home, business and farm loans made in Mississippi in 1947, only two went to Black veterans.

Education told a more mixed story. The economists Sarah Turner and John Bound found that the bill substantially raised college attainment for white veterans and for Black veterans born outside the South. Black veterans from the South gained little. They were limited to about 100 segregated colleges, many of them small and short of money. Only about a dozen Black counselors advised veterans in all of Georgia and Alabama, and none in Mississippi. Among Southern men, the bill widened the gap between Black and white.

The red lines

Where a family could buy a home mattered. As the historian Robert K. Nelson of the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project points out, homeownership was arguably the most important way American families built wealth across generations in the twentieth century. Between 1935 and 1940, agents of the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), working with local lenders, developers and appraisers, graded neighborhoods in more than 200 cities for "mortgage security." The best areas got an "A" and were colored green. The worst got a "D," were colored red and were labeled "hazardous." The grades depended in part on the race, ethnicity and class of residents. Most red areas were white, often immigrant, neighborhoods. But Nelson finds that African American neighborhoods were almost always rated "hazardous," whatever residents earned.

The agents' own words show the logic. In Tacoma, Washington, one small area was rated "D," though it was otherwise identical to the B-rated neighborhood around it, for this reason:

Three highly respected Negro families own homes and live in the middle block of the area.... While very much above the average of their race, it is quite generally recognized by Realtors that their presence seriously detracts from the desirability of their immediate neighborhood.

HOLC did not use its maps in its own lending. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured mortgages, made redlining maps of its own and used them for decades. As a result, federally insured mortgages flowed to white families and were all but closed to Black families. Restrictive covenants, clauses written into property deeds, added another barrier. The one at issue in Shelley v. Kraemer barred "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race." In that case, decided on 3 May 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that courts could not enforce such covenants, because judicial enforcement would deny "the equal protection of the laws." Redlining went on. Only with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Nelson notes, did these practices become illegal.

Researchers using these maps have found that formerly redlined areas today tend to be hotter and more polluted, with fewer trees, and that their residents tend to be less healthy. Nelson cautions, though, that claiming the maps alone caused today's inequalities is almost certainly an oversimplification. The maps are evidence of a wider system of discrimination.

The point: Federal programs that were race-neutral on paper were carried out by local officials, private lenders and redlining maps. Together they channeled homeownership and wealth to white families.

Common misconceptions

• The G.I. Bill helped all veterans equally. Its terms were race-neutral, but local administration and segregation sharply limited Black veterans' loans, and in the South their college options.
• Redlining was only private prejudice. A federal agency drew the HOLC maps, and the Federal Housing Administration used its own maps for decades to decide which mortgages to insure.
• Red on the maps simply meant Black. Most red areas were white, often immigrant, neighborhoods, but Black neighborhoods were almost always rated "hazardous," regardless of income.
• Black Americans waited for Truman to integrate the military. Randolph's threatened march, the Double V campaign and postwar activism pushed presidents to act.
• Redlining alone explains today's inequalities. Scholars find strong links, but warn that the maps are evidence of a larger system, not its only cause.

Putting it together

• James G. Thompson's 1942 letter launched the Pittsburgh Courier's Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
• A. Philip Randolph's threatened march won Executive Order 8802 (25 June 1941) against job discrimination in defense industries and government.
• More than a million Black men served in a segregated military; Executive Order 9981 (26 July 1948) ordered equal treatment in the armed forces.
• The G.I. Bill (1944) was race-neutral on paper, but in Mississippi in 1947 only 2 of 3,229 guaranteed loans went to Black veterans, and it widened Southern education gaps.
• HOLC and FHA redlining and restrictive covenants shut Black families out of homeownership; Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and the Fair Housing Act (1968) began to change the law.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). James G. Thompson: Originator of the Double V campaign. nps.gov
2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). Should I sacrifice to live "half-American"? Experiencing History. perspectives.ushmm.org
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of discrimination in the defense industry (1941). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. National Archives. (n.d.). Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the armed forces (1948). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
5. National Archives. (n.d.). Servicemen's Readjustment Act (1944). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
6. National Park Service. (n.d.). Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site. nps.gov
7. Katznelson, I. (n.d.). When affirmative action was white. History and Policy. historyandpolicy.org
8. National Bureau of Economic Research. (2002, December). The G.I. Bill, World War II, and the education of Black Americans [Summary of Turner and Bound, Working Paper 9044]. The Digest. nber.org
9. Nelson, R. K. (n.d.). Introduction. Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond. dsl.richmond.edu
10. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
11. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. (n.d.). The Fair Housing Act. justice.gov

Fifty thousand leaflets, December 1955

On Thursday, 1 December 1955, police in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. That night Jo Ann Robinson went to work. She taught English at Alabama State College and was president of the Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black professional women founded in 1946. With two students and John Cannon, who chaired the college's business department, she mimeographed about 52,500 leaflets. They called for a one-day boycott of the city's buses on Monday, 5 December. Robinson organized groups to carry them through Montgomery's Black neighborhoods.

The leaflets worked because the ground had been prepared for years. In 1949 a driver had ordered Robinson off a nearly empty bus for sitting in the fifth row. As WPC president from 1950, she made bus seating a top priority, and the council complained again and again to city officials. In a letter of 21 May 1954, she warned Mayor W. A. Gayle that more than twenty-five local groups were talking of a city-wide bus boycott.

Others had already defied the buses. In 1955 two teenagers, Claudette Colvin, 15, and Mary Louise Smith, 18, were arrested for refusing to give up their seats. Parks herself was a seasoned activist. She had joined the Montgomery NAACP in 1943 and been elected its secretary. That summer she had attended a workshop on carrying out school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where the teacher and organizer Septima Clark encouraged her. After the arrest, E. D. Nixon, a former head of the local NAACP, arranged her bail with Clifford and Virginia Durr.

On 5 December, the King Institute at Stanford University reports, about 90 percent of Montgomery's Black residents stayed off the buses. That afternoon local ministers and leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). As president they chose a minister new to the city, Martin Luther King Jr. The one-day protest became a boycott of 381 days. A carpool of about 300 cars carried riders, and women such as Robinson, Johnnie Carr and Irene West kept its committees running. Mary Fair Burks of the WPC gave the credit to the cooks and maids who walked for miles, day after day, for a year.

The city fought back. Officials indicted more than 80 boycott leaders, and early in 1956 the homes of King and Nixon were bombed. The end came through the courts. The lawyers Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford filed Browder v. Gayle for four Black women: Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. On 5 June 1956 a federal court struck down bus segregation, and on 13 November the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling. Montgomery's buses were integrated on 21 December 1956.

Robinson's leaflets frame this lesson. The civil rights movement is often told as the story of one great leader. It grew instead from local groups like the WPC, from decades of work in the courts, and from national organizations that did not always agree. Where did the movement come from, and how did its organizations differ?

Roots: segregation, the courts and terror

By the 1950s, state and local laws across the South kept Black and white people apart in schools, buses, parks and restaurants. The National Archives notes that poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules limited Black voting in the South. People who tried to register risked harassment, economic reprisals and violence. The NAACP, founded in 1909, fought back in court. In 1940 it set up a separate legal arm, the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed by Thurgood Marshall. Its lawyers brought school cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. On 17 May 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled:

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Brown did not end segregation at once. In a second ruling, on 31 May 1955, the Court asked only that schools desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Resistance followed. In March 1956, 19 senators and 82 representatives from the former Confederate states signed the Southern Manifesto. It attacked Brown as an abuse of judicial power and urged "lawful means" to resist it. In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the state's National Guard to keep Black students out of Little Rock's Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower then federalized the Guard and sent about 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. On 25 September they escorted the Little Rock Nine into the school.

Terror answered every challenge. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi. He reportedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, outside her family's store. Days later her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J. W. Milam, with at least one other person, abducted and murdered him. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (then Mamie Bradley), refused to let him be buried quickly in Mississippi. She brought his body home to Chicago and insisted on an open-casket funeral, and thousands of mourners came. She also allowed Jet, a Black weekly magazine, to publish photographs of his body.

In September an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, who later confessed in Look magazine. The National Park Service credits Mamie Till-Mobley's choices with turning private grief into a national cause. The Montgomery boycott began three months after her son's body was found. In 2021 the Justice Department closed a re-investigation of the case. With no federal hate crime law in 1955 and the old time limits long past, no federal prosecution was possible.

Remember: The movement did not begin with one act on one bus. It grew from decades of court cases, from local groups such as the Women's Political Council, and from outrage at violence such as the murder of Emmett Till.

Five organizations compared

Five national organizations played leading parts in the campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. All sought equal citizenship for Black Americans, but they differed in age, membership, methods and style. The table draws on the King Institute's encyclopedia entries for each group.

The groups often disagreed. Many sit-in students belonged to NAACP youth groups, and NAACP leaders publicly backed the 1960 sit-ins. But the King Institute notes that some privately doubted student-led civil disobedience, which challenged the NAACP's reliance on lawsuits. King and others hoped SNCC would become SCLC's youth wing, but the students stayed fiercely independent. SNCC organizers such as Bob Moses favored grassroots work without a chain of command. Yet the groups also worked together. In 1962 all five launched the Voter Education Project. In 1963 they joined A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Remember: The five organizations shared a goal but not a method. The NAACP sued and lobbied, the Urban League offered jobs and services, CORE used direct action, SCLC ran church-based mass campaigns and SNCC organized students and rural communities.

From the lunch counter to the bridge

On 1 February 1960, four students from North Carolina A&T College sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain and David Richmond. Asked to leave, they politely refused. By the end of the month, sit-ins had spread to more than 30 places in 7 states. By the end of April, more than 50,000 students had taken part. In Nashville, the Vanderbilt theology student James Lawson trained students such as John Lewis, Diane Nash and Marion Barry in Gandhian nonviolence. Protesters were often heckled, beaten and arrested, but they kept coming.

In May 1961, CORE sent an interracial group of Freedom Riders south by bus. They were testing Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 Supreme Court ruling against segregated bus terminals. On 14 May a mob attacked the riders at Anniston, Alabama, and firebombed one of the buses. When CORE halted the ride, Diane Nash and other Nashville students insisted on going on, under SNCC's sponsorship. That November the Interstate Commerce Commission began enforcing equal treatment in interstate travel.

In April and May 1963, SCLC joined Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in Birmingham. They used marches, sit-ins and a boycott of downtown stores. King was jailed on 12 April and wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in his cell. In early May more than 1,000 Black students marched in what became known as the Children's Crusade. Police under Eugene "Bull" Connor turned high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on young marchers, and the pictures caused outrage around the world. In June President John F. Kennedy went on television to call for action, and he soon proposed a civil rights bill.

On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. After Kennedy's assassination, the bill faced a long filibuster by Southern senators. With strong support from President Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate leaders broke it. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964. It outlawed segregation in businesses such as restaurants, theaters and hotels, banned job discrimination and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Selma, Alabama, came next. There, despite repeated attempts by local Black residents to register, only 2 percent were on the voting rolls. On 2 January 1965, King and SCLC joined SNCC, the Dallas County Voters League and other local activists in a voting rights campaign. On 18 February, during a night march in nearby Marion, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon who was protecting his mother. He died eight days later. On 7 March, Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers and local lawmen attacked them with clubs and tear gas. Television coverage of "Bloody Sunday" brought national outrage.

On 15 March, President Johnson went before Congress and a national television audience to call for a voting rights law:

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Protected by federalized National Guard troops, the march left Selma on 21 March. It reached the state capitol in Montgomery, 54 miles away, on 25 March, with about 25,000 people on the final day. Two white supporters, the Unitarian minister James Reeb from Massachusetts and the Michigan volunteer Viola Liuzzo, were killed by white attackers during the campaign. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August 1965. It outlawed literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters and required covered places to get federal approval before changing voting rules. By the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new Black voters had registered, one-third of them by federal examiners.

Remember: National laws followed local campaigns. The sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham and Selma forced the country to watch, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 turned that pressure into law.

Common misconceptions

• Rosa Parks was simply too tired to move. She was an experienced NAACP officer who had trained at Highlander that summer. She later wrote in her autobiography that "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
• The movement began in Montgomery in 1955. The NAACP's court campaign, Randolph's 1941 march threat, CORE's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation and the Women's Political Council's complaints all came first.
• Martin Luther King Jr. started and led every campaign. Local people began the Montgomery boycott, the Greensboro sit-ins and the Selma voting drive, and CORE and SNCC ran the Freedom Rides, which King declined to join.
• Brown v. Board ended school segregation. The Court asked only for "all deliberate speed," and Southern officials resisted for years, as the Southern Manifesto and Little Rock showed.
• The civil rights organizations always agreed. They argued over lawsuits versus direct action and over who should lead, though they also worked together on voter registration and the March on Washington.

What to remember

• Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council turned Rosa Parks's arrest on 1 December 1955 into a boycott that lasted 381 days and ended with Browder v. Gayle.
• NAACP lawyers won Brown v. Board of Education (17 May 1954), but the Southern Manifesto and Little Rock showed how hard Southern officials resisted.
• The murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and his mother's decision to let the nation see what had been done to him, galvanized the movement.
• The NAACP, the National Urban League, CORE, SCLC and SNCC differed in methods and membership but worked together on projects such as the 1963 March on Washington.
• The sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham and Selma built the pressure that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Sources

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
2. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Montgomery bus boycott. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Parks, Rosa. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
4. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
5. Parks, R., with Haskins, J. (1992). Rosa Parks: My story. Dial Books.
6. National Archives. (n.d.). Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
7. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). The Southern Manifesto of 1956. history.house.gov
8. National Park Service. (n.d.). Crisis timeline. Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. nps.gov
9. National Park Service. (n.d.). Mamie Till-Mobley. nps.gov
10. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. (2021, December 6). Federal officials close cold case re-investigation of murder of Emmett Till [Press release]. justice.gov
11. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
12. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). National Urban League. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
13. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
14. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
15. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
16. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Sit-ins. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
17. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Freedom Rides. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
18. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Birmingham campaign. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
19. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
20. National Archives. (n.d.). Civil Rights Act (1964). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
21. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Selma to Montgomery march. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
22. National Archives. (n.d.). Voting Rights Act (1965). Milestone Documents. archives.gov

"Is this America?" Atlantic City, August 1964

On 22 August 1964, a sharecropper's daughter from the Mississippi Delta sat before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Fannie Lou Hamer spoke for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). It was asking the committee to seat its delegates in place of Mississippi's all-white official delegation. Hamer described how she had been fired, threatened and beaten for trying to register to vote. Television networks carried her testimony live until President Lyndon B. Johnson scheduled an appearance of his own at the same moment, forcing them to cut away. That evening the news broadcast her testimony in full.

Near the end, as the SNCC Digital Gateway records it, she asked the committee: "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave"? She meant a country where people were threatened every day simply for wanting to live as decent human beings.

Hamer was not a lawyer, a minister or a college graduate. She had left school at 12 to work in the cotton fields. This lesson asks how women like her, and the songs they sang, carried the civil rights movement, often without the titles or the headlines that went to men.

From the cotton fields to the courthouse

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917, the youngest of 20 children in a family of sharecroppers. She grew up on a plantation in Sunflower County. After the sixth grade she left school to pick cotton. For 18 years she worked on the Marlowe plantation as a sharecropper and as a timekeeper, a job she was given because she could read and write.

In 1962 organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), among them Bob Moses, came to Sunflower County to register Black voters. In August, 18 local people, Hamer among them, rode a bus from Ruleville to the county courthouse in Indianola. Armed white men stood around the building. Hamer was the first to enter the registrar's office. On the way home, police stopped the bus and arrested the driver on a charge that his bus was the wrong color. As fear spread, Hamer began to sing, first church songs and then movement songs, and the riders grew calm.

The plantation owner told Hamer to withdraw her application or leave. She refused and was put off his land. Soon afterward, white men fired 16 shots into the house in town where she was staying, barely missing the people inside. In 1963 SNCC hired her as a field secretary. In her forties, she was its oldest employee.

In June 1963 Hamer and nine other Mississippi activists were riding home from a citizenship training workshop run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in South Carolina. At a bus stop in Winona, Mississippi, police arrested five of them for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter. They arrested Hamer when she stepped off the bus to help. In the Winona jail, officers beat the activists, and police forced two Black prisoners to beat Hamer, who suffered lasting injuries. That December the Justice Department prosecuted the local sheriff and police chief, but an all-white jury acquitted them.

What matters here: Hamer's leadership grew out of her own experience. A sharecropper who had left school at 12 became one of the movement's most powerful voices because she could tell the truth about Mississippi and sing people through their fear.

Ella Baker and group-centered leadership

Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903 and raised in North Carolina, on land her grandparents had worked as enslaved people. After graduating from Shaw University in 1927, she spent her life organizing. As the NAACP's director of branches in the 1940s, she built a network of local contacts across the South. She resigned in 1946 when she could not turn the organization toward grassroots work. In 1958 she moved to Atlanta to run SCLC's Crusade for Citizenship and its office.

Baker rejected leadership built around one charismatic man. She clashed with SCLC's ministers, and Andrew Young later recalled that the Baptist church had no tradition of women leading on their own. After the 1960 sit-ins, she persuaded King to put up $800 for a conference of student activists at Shaw University. There she urged the students to form their own organization rather than become SCLC's youth wing. Her approach became known as group-centered leadership: organizers help ordinary people develop the skills to lead themselves, instead of waiting for one leader.

That summer Baker sent Bob Moses to meet Amzie Moore, a local NAACP leader in Cleveland, Mississippi. Out of that meeting came SNCC's first voter registration project. Baker left SCLC in August 1960, advised SNCC for years and helped organize the MFDP. She died in 1986.

Teachers and strategists

Septima Clark, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1898, taught school for 40 years. In 1956 South Carolina barred public employees from belonging to civil rights groups. Clark refused to quit the NAACP and lost her job. She went to work full time at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where she had already led summer workshops. Rosa Parks attended one of them months before the Montgomery boycott. Clark believed that literacy and political power went together. Her citizenship schools taught adults to read, to know their rights as citizens and to fill out voter registration forms.

When Tennessee forced Highlander to close in 1961, SCLC took over the program, with Clark as its director of education. Hamer was coming home from one of its workshops when she was arrested in Winona.

Diane Nash, a Fisk University student from Chicago, trained in James Lawson's nonviolence workshops and was a driving force in the Nashville sit-ins of 1960. In February 1961 she was jailed in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and chose jail rather than bail. That spring, after CORE halted the Freedom Rides, Nash coordinated the Nashville students who carried them on into Mississippi. She later worked for SCLC in Birmingham and Selma.

Women often did this work without the titles men held. In Montgomery, the King Institute notes, most publicity went to Black ministers, while women ran the committees. Clark found that most men in SCLC did not take women very seriously, though she believed King did.

What matters here: Black women led in many ways: Baker by organizing, Clark by teaching, Nash by direct action and Hamer by speaking from experience. Their belief that ordinary people could lead themselves shaped SNCC and the Mississippi movement.

Freedom Summer and the challenge in Atlantic City

Mississippi was the hardest place to organize. SNCC had worked there since 1961, and from 1962 it led a coalition of civil rights groups called the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). For the summer of 1964, COFO invited about 1,000 volunteers, most of them white Northern college students, to join a Freedom Summer project. Training began on 14 June in Oxford, Ohio. A week later three civil rights workers disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi: James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and two white Northerners, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Their murdered bodies were found in early August.

About 17,000 Black Mississippians tried to register that summer, but registrars accepted only about 1,600 applications. Volunteers also taught more than 3,000 young people in 41 Freedom Schools. Besides regular subjects, the schools taught Black history, the ideas of the movement and leadership skills.

Because Black Mississippians were shut out of the state Democratic Party, activists founded the MFDP in April 1964, open to people of all races. It held its own precinct, county and regional meetings and chose a 68-member delegation at a state convention in Jackson on 6 August. Its delegates included Hamer, Victoria Gray, Annie Devine and E. W. Steptoe.

In Atlantic City, the NAACP, CORE, SCLC and SNCC all lobbied for the MFDP. President Johnson feared losing white Southern votes in the November election. The committee offered a compromise: two at-large seats for the MFDP, seats for the all-white regulars and a promise to bar segregated delegations from 1968 on. King supported the compromise. Hamer insisted that the whole delegation deserved its seats, and the MFDP delegates rejected the offer. When most of the regular Mississippi delegates walked out, MFDP members borrowed passes and sat in the empty seats. When the chairs were taken away, they stood and sang freedom songs.

Hamer kept organizing. By the time she cast her first vote, in 1964, she was a candidate for Congress herself. In 1968 a delegation led by former MFDP members, the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, was seated as the state's only delegation. In 1969 Hamer helped found Freedom Farms, a cooperative to fight hunger among poor Black and white Mississippians. She died in 1977.

What matters here: The MFDP lost its fight for seats in 1964 but changed the Democratic Party, which barred segregated delegations and opened its conventions to more women and people of color. Yet the defeat, together with the murders of Freedom Summer, left many young activists disillusioned with nonviolence, as the next module shows.

Songs of the movement

Hamer's singing on the bus from Indianola was not unusual. Music ran through the whole movement. A Library of Congress essay notes that freedom songs drew on spirituals, gospel, rhythm and blues, blues, calypso and even football chants. Most were hymns or spirituals that Southern Black communities already knew, with new words to fit the struggle. People sang them at mass meetings in churches, on marches and in jail cells. Favorites included "Oh Freedom" and "This Little Light of Mine." The songs sustained people in moments of crisis, and touring singers carried the movement's message to the rest of the country.

The movement's anthem had a long history. According to the Library of Congress, "We Shall Overcome" grew from a 1903 hymn by the Reverend Charles Tindley, "I'll Overcome Some Day," and the tune of a gospel song, "I'll Be All Right." In the mid-1940s, striking tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, sang it on their picket line. One of them, Lucille Simmons, is credited with changing its "I" to "we." Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School learned it from the strikers and taught it to the folk singer Pete Seeger. In 1960 the singer Guy Carawan taught it to Black college students at a Highlander workshop, and it spread from the sit-ins across the country. Five years later, President Johnson borrowed its words in his speech asking Congress for a voting rights law.

Young singers carried the songs further. Bernice Johnson, a student at Albany State College in Georgia, joined the Albany Movement in 1961 and led the singing at its mass meetings. Once, mid-song, she changed the word trouble in a familiar song to freedom, and the whole church joined in. Suspended from college for her activism, she joined SNCC's new Freedom Singers in 1962. The group toured the country to raise money for SNCC's projects in the Deep South. As Bernice Johnson Reagon, she later founded the Harambee Singers in 1966 and Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group of African American women, in 1973.

Artists and photographers take sides

Professional artists joined in too. Marian Anderson, Odetta, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang at the March on Washington in 1963. Some artists wrote in anger. In June 1963 the Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot and killed. On 15 September a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four Black girls. Nina Simone answered with "Mississippi Goddam," written, she said, in under an hour. She called it her first civil rights song. It set furious words to a bright show-tune melody, and when she recorded it live at Carnegie Hall, some in the mostly white audience laughed at first. Some people later broke copies of the record and mailed them back to the company. In later concerts she changed the places named in it to honor new struggles, among them Selma.

Photographers served the movement as well. In August 1962 Danny Lyon, a University of Chicago student, became SNCC's first staff photographer. His 1962 photograph inside the courthouse in Albany, Georgia, shows segregated drinking fountains: a large water cooler for white people beside a small bowl for Black people. It appears on the SNCC Digital Gateway's page on the photography department. That department grew to include Tamio Wakayama, Maria Varela, Julius Lester and others. It ran darkrooms in Atlanta, Jackson and Selma and put cameras into the hands of local people. Julian Bond, SNCC's communications director, said the pictures themselves became organizers, showing what the movement did and who did it.

What matters here: Songs, records and photographs were tools of the struggle. Freedom songs held people together under pressure, touring singers raised money, and artists and photographers carried the movement's story to people who would never see Mississippi.

Common misconceptions

• Men led the movement and women supported it. Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer and Jo Ann Robinson organized, taught and led, even when the publicity went to ministers.
• Movement leaders were all educated professionals. Hamer, a sharecropper who left school at 12, became one of its strongest voices, and Baker's whole method aimed to help ordinary people lead themselves.
• Freedom Summer was mainly the work of white volunteers. SNCC and local Black Mississippians had organized since 1961. The volunteers came at COFO's invitation, and the project aimed to build a movement local people could sustain after they left.
• The MFDP won its seats at Atlantic City. It rejected the offer of two at-large seats. Its gains came later, when segregated delegations were barred and a delegation led by former MFDP members was seated in 1968.
• Freedom songs were only background music. They calmed fear, held people together, raised money and spread the movement's message across the country.

The short version

• Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, was evicted, shot at and beaten for seeking the vote, and testified for the MFDP in Atlantic City on 22 August 1964.
• Ella Baker called the meeting that founded SNCC and taught group-centered leadership: ordinary people developing their own leadership instead of following one leader.
• Septima Clark's citizenship schools linked literacy to voting, and Diane Nash showed the power of students in the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides.
• Freedom Summer and the MFDP exposed Mississippi's denial of the vote; the MFDP rejected a two-seat compromise but helped open the Democratic Party.
• Freedom songs, the Freedom Singers, Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" and SNCC's photographers made art a tool of the freedom struggle.

Sources

1. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Fannie Lou Hamer. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
2. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Hamer, Fannie Lou. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
3. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Beatings in Winona jail. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
4. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Baker, Ella Josephine. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
5. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Ella Baker. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
6. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Clark, Septima Poinsette. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
7. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Nash, Diane Judith. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
8. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Montgomery bus boycott. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
9. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Freedom Summer. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
10. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
11. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
12. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
13. Allen, E. (2014, September 10). Songs of a movement. Timeless, Library of Congress blog. blogs.loc.gov
14. Stewart, K. (2014, February 6). Tracing the long journey of "We Shall Overcome". Folklife Today, Library of Congress. blogs.loc.gov
15. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Bernice Johnson (Reagon). SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
16. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
17. Fields, L. (2021, January 14). The story behind Nina Simone's protest song, "Mississippi Goddam". American Masters, PBS. pbs.org
18. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Photography Department. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org

"Black Power," Greenwood, June 1966

On 5 June 1966, James Meredith set out to walk 220 miles from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Four years earlier he had become the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Now he wanted to challenge the fear that kept Black Mississippians from registering to vote. On the second day of his walk, a white man shot him with a shotgun near Hernando, and he was taken to a hospital in Memphis. Leaders of three organizations took up the march in his place: Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC, Floyd McKissick of CORE and SNCC's new chairman, Stokely Carmichael. SNCC wanted the march to stop in Mississippi towns and register voters along the way.

On 16 June, in Greenwood, Carmichael was released from jail after his 27th arrest. At a rally that day he cried, "We want Black Power!" SNCC organizers had used the phrase in Alabama, short for "black power for black people," and SNCC's Willie Ricks shouted it on the march as well. Now it was a public slogan. It dominated news coverage of the march and made Carmichael nationally famous. King opposed it, fearing that it suggested violence and separatism. Carmichael later said he had used it on the march to force King to take a stand.

Behind the slogan lay a real disagreement about strategy. One side held that integration and disciplined nonviolence would win equal citizenship. The other held that Black people needed to build their own power first, and to defend themselves when attacked. This lesson sets out each case in its own terms. It then follows Black Power into religion, politics, the Black Panther Party, the arts and ideas about beauty and history.

Two answers to the same question

The table draws on the King Institute's encyclopedia and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Both sides were arguing about how to win freedom, and they overlapped. King came to say that Black people needed political and economic power, and in 1967 he and Carmichael both spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Religion and nationalism: the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X

Black nationalism had deep roots, from Martin Delany's plans for emigration in the 1850s to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s. In the 1930s a Detroit peddler named Farrad Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam (NOI). It taught a revised version of Islam and aimed to build a separate, economically self-sufficient Black community. After he disappeared in 1934, his disciple Elijah Muhammad led the movement.

Malcolm Little, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, joined the NOI while in prison in Massachusetts. After his release in 1952 he dropped what he called his slave name and became Malcolm X. By the late 1950s he was the NOI's leading spokesman. He called for racial independence and sharply criticized King's nonviolence and his work with white allies. In the spring of 1964 Malcolm X broke with the NOI and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He then reached out to the Southern movement, meeting SNCC workers including John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer, and early in 1965 he visited Selma. On 21 February 1965 he was assassinated.

Armed self-defense had Southern roots too. In 1959 Robert F. Williams, president of the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, argued that Black people must answer violence with violence when the courts failed them. A white man accused of attacking a Black woman had just been acquitted. The NAACP suspended Williams, and he and King debated nonviolence in print. In his 1962 book Negroes with Guns, Williams wrote that he did not want violence for its own sake, only flexibility in the struggle.

Bottom line: Black nationalism and armed self-defense were not new in 1966. They drew on Garvey, the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and Southern activists like Williams, and they spoke to people whom nonviolent campaigns had not yet helped.

What Black Power meant

The National Archives describes Black Power as a movement that emphasized racial pride, economic empowerment and the creation of Black political and cultural institutions. The term had earlier uses. The novelist Richard Wright published a book called Black Power in 1954. In 1965 and 1966 SNCC organizers helped Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama, build an independent party. The county was about 80 percent Black, yet in 1965 it had only one Black registered voter, John Hulett. By October 1965, with help from federal registrars under the Voting Rights Act, about 2,000 Black residents had registered.

Local people called their party the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and chose a black panther as its symbol. As Hulett explained it, a panther does not back down when attacked. The state Democratic Party's symbol, a white rooster, carried the words "white supremacy for the right." In 1970 Hulett became the county's sheriff.

As SNCC's chairman, Carmichael argued that Black people had to unite among themselves before they could join a multiracial society as equals. With Charles V. Hamilton he set out the case in a 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. SNCC and CORE embraced Black Power, and SNCC came to exclude white members, a decision Carmichael himself had opposed. The NAACP and SCLC rejected the slogan. King called it unwise but agreed that Black Americans had to build political and economic power. He described it as a cry of hurt, born of disappointment at broken promises.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

In October 1966 two young activists in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, borrowing the Lowndes County symbol. The museum explains that they were disappointed that the civil rights movement had done little for Black people outside the South. They saw police brutality as part of a long history of state violence. On 15 October they drafted the Ten-Point Program. Its demands included freedom for Black communities to determine their own destiny, full employment, decent housing, education that taught Black people's true history, and an end to police brutality. Party members confronted politicians and challenged the police. Seale insisted that the Panthers hated oppression, not people of any color.

The Panthers also served their neighborhoods. Their "survival programs," often led by women, fed about 20,000 children a free breakfast each day. They also ran free food programs, schools, legal aid offices, clothing drives, health clinics and testing for sickle-cell disease. The Oakland Community School was led by Ericka Huggins from 1973 to 1981. Women made up about half the membership, and Elaine Brown later became the party's national chair, though the museum notes that members still struggled with gender inequality.

The federal government treated the party as a threat. The FBI's counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, aimed in its own words to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists." According to PBS, drawing on FBI documents, 233 of the program's 295 documented actions against Black groups targeted the Panthers. SNCC was a target too. In 1976 a Senate committee led by Frank Church concluded that intelligence agencies had "undermined the constitutional rights of citizens."

Bottom line: The Black Panther Party combined armed confrontation with the police and practical service to poor neighborhoods. The federal government worked in secret to destroy it, as Congress later confirmed.

The Black Arts Movement

Black Power had an artistic twin. The writer Larry Neal declared that "Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." After Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. He also founded Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey, his hometown. Similar groups grew in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and San Francisco, and the effort became a national movement.

Poetry grew fastest. The Academy of American Poets notes that Black Arts writers drew on Black speech, music and sermons, writing free verse shaped by jazz and the blues. Leading figures included Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Jayne Cortez, Mari Evans, Etheridge Knight and the critic Hoyt Fuller. Visual artists joined in. Elizabeth Catlett's 1969 print Negro Es Bello II sets the Spanish words for "Black is beautiful" beside images of panthers, linking Black pride to Black Power. The museum reproduces it on its Black Is Beautiful page.

The movement drew sharp judgments. Critics have called it misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and racially exclusive, and in 1994 the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. judged it short-lived and unsuccessful. Others credit it with inspiring later generations of Black, Latino, Indigenous and LGBTQ writers who say they owe it a debt.

Black Is Beautiful, Kwanzaa and Afrocentricity

The phrase "black is beautiful," the museum explains, stood for a broad embrace of Black culture and identity. It honored the Black past and focused on emotional and psychological well-being. It affirmed natural hairstyles such as the Afro and the full variety of Black skin colors, hair textures and features. An Afro pick with a handle shaped like a raised fist could declare loyalty to Black Power. Some Black Americans wore styles linked to African heritage, and some studied Swahili.

In 1966 the activist and scholar Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa, a week-long celebration from 26 December to 1 January. Its name comes from a Swahili phrase about first fruits. It rests on seven principles, the Nguzo Saba: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. The museum stresses that it is a cultural celebration, not a religious one, open to people of every faith.

In the 1980s the scholar Molefi Kete Asante coined the term Afrocentricity for the theory he developed. As Temple University describes it, an Afrocentric approach puts Black people at the center of whatever subject is studied. In 1988 Asante created the nation's first doctoral program in African American Studies at Temple. Britannica traces the idea's roots to Garvey, Du Bois's Pan-African congresses, Negritude, the Nation of Islam, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop and Carter G. Woodson. Critics, including the classicist Mary Lefkowitz, charged some Afrocentric writing with historical errors about the ancient world. Supporters answer that it remains a valuable worldview, one that lets people of African descent tell their own history after centuries of European domination.

Bottom line: Black Power was also a cultural revolution. Poems, plays, prints, hairstyles, a new holiday and a new academic field all asked Black Americans to define themselves on their own terms.

Common misconceptions

• Black Power meant hatred of white people. Its advocates described it as racial pride, self-determination and Black political and economic power, and Seale said the Panthers hated oppression, not people.
• The Black Panthers were only about guns. Their survival programs fed about 20,000 children a day and ran schools and health clinics.
• Malcolm X never changed. In 1964 he broke with the Nation of Islam, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and reached out to SNCC and the Southern movement.
• Black Power began with Carmichael in 1966. Richard Wright used the term in 1954, Lowndes County used it in 1965, and its ideas reach back to Delany, Garvey and the Nation of Islam.
• King and Black Power advocates had nothing in common. Both sought Black political and economic power, and King and Carmichael both opposed the Vietnam War.

Summing up

• Stokely Carmichael's cry of "Black Power" in Greenwood on 16 June 1966 brought a long debate over strategy into the open.
• The integrationist side relied on nonviolence, coalitions and federal law; the nationalist side stressed self-determination, Black institutions and self-defense.
• The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams shaped Black nationalism and self-defense before 1966; Lowndes County gave Black Power its panther.
• The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in October 1966, joined confrontation with the police to survival programs, and the FBI's COINTELPRO set out to destroy it.
• The Black Arts Movement, Black Is Beautiful, Kwanzaa and Afrocentricity carried Black Power into art, style, celebration and scholarship.

Sources

1. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Meredith March. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
2. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Black Power. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Carmichael, Stokely. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
4. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Stokely Carmichael. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
5. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Black nationalism. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
6. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Malcolm X. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
7. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Williams, Robert Franklin. Stanford University. kinginstitute.stanford.edu
8. National Archives. (n.d.). Black Power. African American Heritage. archives.gov
9. SNCC Digital Gateway. (n.d.). Lowndes County Freedom Organization founded. SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University. snccdigital.org
10. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). The Black Panther Party: Challenging police and promoting social change. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
11. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). All power to the people! Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
12. PBS. (n.d.). BPP platform. A Huey P. Newton Story. pbs.org
13. PBS. (n.d.). COINTELPRO. A Huey P. Newton Story. pbs.org
14. United States Senate. (n.d.). Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). senate.gov
15. Academy of American Poets. (n.d.). A brief guide to the Black Arts Movement. Poets.org. poets.org
16. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Black is beautiful: The emergence of Black culture and identity in the 60s and 70s. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
17. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Kwanzaa. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
18. Temple University. (2008, April 14). African American studies doctoral program turns 20. Temple Now. now.temple.edu
19. Early, G., and the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2026, October 6). Afrocentrism. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com

Five women and a seniority list, St. Louis, 1976

In January 1974 a recession hit the auto industry, and the General Motors (GM) assembly plant in St. Louis laid off more than 2,000 workers. Under the union contract's seniority rules, the last workers hired were the first let go. According to the federal appeals court that later heard the case, the layoffs reached every worker hired after May 1968. That included every one of the plant's Black women production workers. Emma DeGraffenreid had been hired on 12 June 1973 and was laid off on 15 January 1974.

Black women had so little seniority because GM had barely hired them. Before 1970 the plant employed just one Black woman, as a janitor. It hired 6 Black women for production jobs in 1970, 11 in 1971, none in 1972 and 137 in 1973. In 1975 DeGraffenreid and four other Black women sued GM and the United Automobile Workers, with lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. They argued that the seniority system carried GM's past discrimination against Black women into the present.

On 4 May 1976, District Judge Wangelin ruled against them. He wrote:

The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new "super-remedy" which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended.

The court looked at the claims one at a time. On sex, it found no discrimination, because GM had hired women before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Those women, the appeals court later noted, worked in the plant's cushion room, where no Black women were employed. On race, the court said the women's claims should be joined to a separate race-discrimination suit already pending against GM. Treating Black women as a protected group of their own, the judge warned, would open "the hackneyed Pandora's box" of new protected classes.

So the women lost both ways. As the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw later explained, an employer that had hired Black men and white women could defeat a claim by Black women. In 1977 the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals revived the women's race claim under a Reconstruction-era civil rights law. It rejected their challenge to the seniority system for other reasons. This lesson asks why the law could not see Black women in 1976, and what Black feminist thinkers built to make them visible.

The bug: one category at a time

The court's reasoning rested on a common idea: discrimination is about race or about sex, and a person who faces both simply adds them together. On this view, a Black woman's case is a race case plus a sex case. A related idea treats oppressions as a ranking, as if the task were to decide which group suffers most.

Black feminists answered that both ideas miss what actually happens. Discrimination against Black women is often a specific harm of its own, not the sum of racism against Black men and sexism against white women. In DeGraffenreid, the women's sex claim failed because GM had hired white women, and their race claim was pushed into a suit about Black workers in general. The particular harm to Black women fell between the two.

Why this matters: Laws and arguments that look at one category at a time can miss the people who stand where categories meet.

A long tradition

The insight was old. Sojourner Truth claimed equal rights as a Black woman at Akron in 1851. In 1892 the educator Anna Julia Cooper described the position of Black women in A Voice from the South:

She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.

The lawyer and activist Pauli Murray called the double burden of racism and sexism Jane Crow. The National Park Service credits Murray's efforts as critical to keeping "sex" in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Murray's vision of a civil rights organization for women became the National Organization for Women, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged Murray as a mother of feminist legal strategy. In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. Meanwhile, in 1968, Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn became the first African American woman elected to Congress. In 1972 she ran for the Democratic nomination for president.

Black feminism organizes

In the 1960s and 1970s many Black women felt pushed to the edges of two movements. The Combahee River Collective later wrote that racism and elitism inside the women's movement had hidden Black women's part in it. The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that even the Black Panther Party, where women made up about half the members, struggled with gender inequality. In 1973 Black feminists in New York formed the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In Boston, a group of Black feminists began meeting in 1974 and soon became an independent collective. Its name is that of the South Carolina river where, in June 1863, Harriet Tubman helped lead a raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people.

The collective set out its ideas in a statement dated April 1977. Its members described a fight against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression, based on the view that "the major systems of oppression are interlocking." They argued that some harms are neither solely racial nor solely sexual, and that Black women usually experience race, sex and class at the same time. They used the phrase identity politics for organizing around their own experience. They also declared solidarity with progressive Black men, fighting racism alongside them while challenging them about sexism. Their work included campaigns against sterilization abuse and for abortion rights, plans for a refuge for battered women, and possible projects such as workplace organizing and a rape crisis center.

Why this matters: Black feminists did not choose between the struggle against racism and the struggle against sexism. They argued that for Black women the two were one struggle, tied to class.

Womanism

The novelist Alice Walker offered another word. She coined womanist in a 1981 story collection and explained it in her 1983 essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Walker drew the word from a Black folk expression for a girl acting grown up, bold and willful. Britannica describes womanism as a framework centered on the concerns of women of color, especially Black women, that takes race and class into account as well as gender. Walker suggested that womanist relates to feminist as a deep color relates to a paler shade of it, a broader outlook rather than a branch of feminism.

Others reshaped the idea. In 1993 the scholar Clenora Hudson-Weems argued in Africana Womanism for an approach rooted in African-descended families and communities and separate from Western feminism. Critics have charged that womanism can divide people working for gender equality, and that some versions overlooked queer women of color.

Naming the intersection

In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw published an article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum that gave the idea its best-known name: intersectionality. The image is a crossroads. A person standing where two roads meet can be struck by traffic from either direction, or from both at once. Crenshaw has explained that she designed the concept for cases like DeGraffenreid, in which courts dismissed claims by Black women because an employer had hired Black men and white women. In a 2017 interview with Columbia Law School, she described intersectionality as a lens for seeing where forms of power meet and interlock. She added that it was never meant to be a grand theory of everything, and warned against using it as an excuse to say that things are simply complicated.

Other thinkers widened the picture. The poet Audre Lorde, the daughter of immigrants from Grenada, wrote as a Black lesbian, a mother and, later, a woman living with cancer. In essays collected in Sister Outsider (1984), she urged feminists to treat the differences among women as a source of strength rather than division. The writer bell hooks (1952-2021), who grew up in segregated Kentucky, wrote about how race, gender and class shape one another. The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins published Black Feminist Thought in 1990. As a student at Brandeis University she had been advised by Pauli Murray. In 2009 she served as president of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman in that office.

Interlocking systems in practice

Why this matters: Interlocking systems produce harms that no single category explains. Intersectionality is a tool for noticing those harms, not a scoreboard for ranking them.

Common misconceptions

• Intersectionality ranks oppressions. It describes how systems of power combine to shape particular lives; it does not decide which group suffers most.
• Intersectionality just adds race and sex together. Black feminists argued that some harms are neither solely racial nor solely sexual but distinct, as the GM layoffs showed.
• Black feminists were against Black men. The Combahee River Collective declared solidarity with progressive Black men, fighting racism together while challenging sexism.
• The idea began in 1989. Crenshaw named it then, but Truth, Cooper, Murray and the Combahee River Collective had made the argument long before.
• Womanism is just another word for feminism. Walker presented it as broader and rooted in Black women's own culture, and Hudson-Weems set Africana womanism apart from Western feminism.

What to carry forward

• In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), a court refused to treat Black women as a group, so the harm done to them as Black women fell between race and sex.
• Black women's double burden was named long before: by Anna Julia Cooper in 1892 and by Pauli Murray's phrase Jane Crow.
• The Combahee River Collective's 1977 statement held that the major systems of oppression interlock, and it joined anti-racism to feminism and class politics.
• Alice Walker's womanism (1981-1983) offered a framework rooted in Black women's culture; Hudson-Weems's Africana womanism (1993) took it in another direction.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw named intersectionality in 1989 as a lens for seeing where systems of power meet, not a ranking of oppressions.

Sources

1. DeGraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division, 413 F. Supp. 142 (E.D. Mo. 1976). Justia. law.justia.com
2. DeGraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division, 558 F.2d 480 (8th Cir. 1977). Public.Resource.Org. law.resource.org
3. Cooper, A. J. (1892). A voice from the South. Aldine Printing House. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. docsouth.unc.edu
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Pauli Murray Family Home. nps.gov
5. National Women's History Museum. (2021). Pauli Murray. womenshistory.org
6. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). Chisholm, Shirley Anita. history.house.gov
7. Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective statement. BlackPast.org. blackpast.org
8. National Park Service. (n.d.). Harriet Tubman. nps.gov
9. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). The Black Panther Party: Challenging police and promoting social change. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
10. Weida, K., and the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Womanism. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
11. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, Article 8. chicagounbound.uchicago.edu
12. Columbia Law School. (2017, June 8). Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, more than two decades later. law.columbia.edu
13. Brandman, M. (2021). Audre Lorde. National Women's History Museum. womenshistory.org
14. Robledo-Allen Yamamoto, A. (2025). bell hooks. National Women's History Museum. womenshistory.org
15. American Sociological Association. (n.d.). Patricia Hill Collins. asanet.org
16. University of Maryland, Department of Sociology. (n.d.). Patricia Hill Collins. socy.umd.edu

A boycott and a caucus, 1971

In January 1971, President Richard Nixon had refused to meet with the Black members of the House of Representatives. So 12 of them boycotted his State of the Union address, and the protest made national news. On 2 February they turned an informal group into a formal, nonpartisan caucus. Charles B. Rangel of New York suggested the name: the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Its first chair was Charles Diggs of Detroit, and Shirley Chisholm was the only woman among its 13 founding members.

Nixon met the caucus on 25 March 1971, and it presented him with 61 recommendations on issues such as racism, housing and Black Americans' place in government. The House's historians record what Diggs told the President:

Our concerns and obligations as members of Congress do not stop at the boundaries of our districts, our concerns are national and international in scope. We are petitioned daily by citizens living hundreds of miles from our districts who look on us as Congressmen-at-large for black people and poor people in the United States.

More than fifty years later, how far has Black America come? The answer depends on which numbers you read and how you read them. This lesson is a procedure for reading data. You will read a table, then change the measure and watch the conclusion change.

Step 1: Read the representation table

The House of Representatives keeps a list of every Black member of Congress, Congress by Congress. The table below takes selected rows from it. The House counts include nonvoting delegates, such as the delegate from the District of Columbia.

First, read the trend. Black representation peaked during Reconstruction, fell to a single member by 1899, and vanished entirely from 1901 to 1929. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and court-ordered redistricting, it grew again, from 6 House members in 1965 to 66 in 2025.

Step 2: Change the measure

Now compare each chamber with the population. In 2023, according to Pew Research Center, 48.3 million people in the United States identified as Black, about 14 percent of the population. In the 119th Congress, two of the 66 Black House members are nonvoting delegates, leaving 64 of the 435 voting members, about 15 percent. Measured by the House, Black representation roughly matches the Black share of the population. Measured by the Senate, it does not: 5 of 100 senators, or 5 percent.

The population figure itself depends on a choice of measure. In the 2020 census, 41.1 million people, 12.4 percent of the country, identified as Black alone. Counting the 5.8 million who identified as Black together with another race raised the total to 46.9 million, or 14.2 percent.

In short: The same table supports "Black representation has reached parity" or "Black Americans remain underrepresented," depending on whether you measure the House or the Senate, and which population count you use.

Step 3: Income or wealth?

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances measures both what families earn in a year and what they own. Economists Aditya Aladangady, Andrew C. Chang and Jacob Krimmel reported these figures for 2022.

Read by income, the typical Black family has a little more than half as much as the typical White family. Read by wealth, it has about one-sixth as much. Wealth builds up over generations through homes, savings and businesses, so it can carry the effects of earlier history. The historian Robert K. Nelson, for example, links today's wealth inequalities to the redlining described in an earlier lesson. In 2022, the authors found, only about 45 percent of Black families owned their homes.

Step 4: Percent or dollars?

Change the measure once more. Between 2019 and 2022, the wealth of the typical Black family grew 61 percent, while the typical White family's grew 31 percent. Measured in percent, the gap was closing. The ratio improved too, from about $9 for every $100 in 2013 to about $16 in 2022. Measured in dollars, however, the gap between the typical White and Black family grew by about $50,000, to more than $220,000. Black families started from a much smaller base, so faster growth still added fewer dollars. The authors also found that Black homeownership, stock ownership and business ownership all rose in these years.

In short: Before accepting a claim about economic progress, ask what is being measured: income or wealth, percent change or dollar gap, typical (median) or average (mean) family.

A more diverse Black America

Black America is also growing more varied. Pew Research Center reports that 5.6 million Black immigrants lived in the United States in 2024, up from 2.4 million in 2000. They made up 11.4 percent of the Black population. About 44 percent were born in Africa and another 44 percent in the Caribbean, and the leading countries of birth were Jamaica, Haiti and Nigeria. Counting the U.S.-born children of immigrants, one Black person in four is an immigrant or the child of one. Multiracial identity is growing too. Pew counts 5.6 million multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Americans in 2023, an increase of 269 percent since 2000.

Faith is changing as well. In a 2021 survey of more than 8,600 Black adults, Pew found that 66 percent of Black Americans were Protestant, 6 percent Catholic and 3 percent members of other Christian groups. Another 3 percent followed non-Christian faiths, most commonly Islam. About 21 percent were religiously unaffiliated, a share that rose to 28 percent among Generation Z and 33 percent among Millennials. Of Black adults who attended services, 60 percent worshiped in congregations where most members and the senior clergy were Black. Yet 61 percent said historically Black congregations should become more racially and ethnically diverse.

Common misconceptions

• Faster growth means a gap is closing. Black family wealth grew faster in percent from 2019 to 2022, yet the dollar gap widened to more than $220,000.
• Parity in the House means parity in Congress. Black members hold about 15 percent of voting House seats but only 5 percent of Senate seats.
• The income gap shows the whole economic picture. The wealth gap is far larger: about $16 for every $100, compared with about $57 for income.
• Black Americans are one uniform group. One in four is an immigrant or the child of one, multiracial identity is rising, and faith ranges from Protestant to Muslim to unaffiliated.
• Nearly all Black Americans belong to a church. About one in five is religiously unaffiliated, and the share is about a third among Millennials.

Looking back

• The Congressional Black Caucus formed in 1971 after a boycott of Nixon's State of the Union, and its members saw themselves as representatives for Black Americans everywhere.
• Black representation vanished from Congress from 1901 to 1929 and grew from 6 House members in 1965 to 66 in 2025.
• Measured by the House, Black representation roughly matches the population; measured by the Senate, it falls far short.
• In 2022 the typical Black family had about $57 of income but only about $16 of wealth for every $100 held by the typical White family.
• Black America is diverse: 11 percent of Black people are immigrants, multiracial identity is growing, and religious life is changing, especially among the young.

Sources

1. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). The Congressional Black Caucus. Black Americans in Congress. history.house.gov
2. Congressional Black Caucus. (n.d.). History. cbc.house.gov
3. History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). Black-American Representatives and Senators by Congress, 1870-present. history.house.gov
4. Martinez, G., and Passel, J. S. (2025, January 23). Facts about the U.S. Black population. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
5. Jones, N., Marks, R., Ramirez, R., and Ríos-Vargas, M. (2021, August 12). 2020 census illuminates racial and ethnic composition of the country. U.S. Census Bureau. census.gov
6. Aladangady, A., Chang, A. C., and Krimmel, J. (2023, October 18). Greater wealth, greater uncertainty: Changes in racial inequality in the Survey of Consumer Finances. FEDS Notes, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. federalreserve.gov
7. Nelson, R. K. (n.d.). Introduction. Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond. dsl.richmond.edu
8. Piña, G., Cahn, A., and Im, C. (2026, March 20). Key findings about Black immigrants in the U.S. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
9. Mohamed, B., Cox, K., Diamant, J., and Gecewicz, C. (2021, February 16). Faith among Black Americans. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org

Nashville, 6 October 1871

Fisk University opened in former Union Army barracks in Nashville in January 1866, and its first students ranged in age from seven to seventy. Five years later the school was deep in debt. On 6 October 1871 a group of its students set out on a singing tour, taking the entire contents of the university treasury with them for travel expenses. They hoped their music could raise enough money to keep Fisk open.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers struggled at first. Before long, the university records, they were moving audiences to tears across the United States and Europe. Their listeners included the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, President Ulysses S. Grant, the writer Mark Twain and Queen Victoria. They introduced much of the world to the spirituals created by enslaved people. Their tours saved the university and paid for Jubilee Hall, completed in 1876, which Fisk describes as the South's first permanent building for the education of Black students. Every 6 October, Fisk still marks the day they left.

The Jubilee Singers show a pattern this lesson follows. Black music and performance have repeatedly been sold to wide audiences, sometimes on terms set by others, while also carrying Black history, faith and protest. How did that music change from spirituals to hip-hop, and how did Black artists fight for control of their own image on stage and screen?

Blues and the record business

The National Park Service notes that Black Southerners moving into cities such as New Orleans brought with them the blues, spirituals and rural dances. The blues reached records in 1920. According to NPR, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" made her the first Black artist to record a blues song. Its success opened a market that record companies called "race records," aimed at Black buyers, which lasted from the 1920s to the 1940s. The scholar Angela Davis later studied three of the era's great singers, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.

Jazz: from New Orleans to the world

The National Park Service traces jazz to New Orleans, a port city where African, Caribbean, French, Spanish and American cultures met. By the mid-1700s enslaved people gathered on Sundays at a market outside the city that became known as Congo Square, famous for African dancing and drumming. After emancipation, Black mutual aid and benevolent societies hired brass bands for parades and funerals, and the crowds that danced behind them became known as the "second line." Between 1895 and 1900 the cornet player Charles "Buddy" Bolden began adding improvised blues to dance tunes, and early musicians credited him with a new style.

New Orleans musicians carried jazz north. In 1922 Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver in Chicago. His recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands (1925-1928) shifted jazz from group improvisation toward the solo, and made him famous around the world. Jazz became the nation's popular music in the swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1940s, at Monday night jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others built bebop. It was a fast, complex style made more for listening than for dancing.

The upshot: Black musicians built new forms out of old ones, from the drumming of Congo Square to the bebop of Minton's. Each new form spread far beyond the communities that created it.

Gospel, the concert stage and rock and roll

In the churches, Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993), commonly called the Father of Gospel music, served as music director at Pilgrim Baptist Church for more than 40 years. On the concert stage, Marian Anderson had sung for audiences around the world. In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall in Washington. Walter White of the NAACP and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes then arranged a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939. The National Museum of African American History and Culture calls it a watershed moment in civil rights history.

The museum's rock and roll gallery features one of Chuck Berry's Cadillacs. In the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!, Berry drove it onto the stage of the Fox Theater in St. Louis. As a child he had been turned away from that same theater because he was Black.

Soul, Motown and funk

In Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr. borrowed $800 from his family and founded Tamla Records on 12 January 1959, adding the Motown label later that year. His headquarters, a house on West Grand Boulevard, became known as Hitsville U.S.A. According to the Detroit Historical Society, Motown produced 110 top ten hits between 1961 and 1971. Its artists included Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops and the Temptations. Other artists made pride the message itself. The museum's account of the Black Is Beautiful era features James Brown's 1968 song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud."

Hip-hop

Hip-hop began in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s, when the borough was suffering from economic decline, cuts in city services and abandoned, burning buildings. A National Archives historian notes that its residents, mostly African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans and others from the African diaspora, turned those hardships into an art form. On 11 August 1973, DJ Kool Herc and his sister, Cindy Campbell, held a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Herc used two turntables to stretch out the breaks, the drum-heavy parts of records, so that dancers could keep going. Other Bronx DJs built on the technique. Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation as an alternative to gang life, and Grandmaster Flash refined scratching and smooth mixing between two turntables.

Hip-hop culture came to include four elements: DJing, emceeing (rapping), breakdancing and graffiti art. Rappers drew on older traditions of rhyme and talk, from preachers and radio DJs to political poets. Among them were the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, whose "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" came out in 1971. Later groups such as Public Enemy used the music for protest and Black pride. The National Museum of African American History and Culture calls Public Enemy among the most influential, pioneering and controversial groups in hip-hop's history. From house parties in the Bronx, hip-hop grew into a global culture.

The upshot: Hip-hop repeated an old pattern. Young Black and Latino New Yorkers made something new from what they had: records, turntables, words and walls. Then it spread around the world.

On stage: from minstrelsy to Broadway

In nineteenth-century minstrel shows, performers in blackface makeup mocked Black people. Black performers could find paying work in this business, but often only inside its stereotypes. The National Museum of African American History and Culture holds an 1879 contract for Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels, a blackface troupe, to perform in Philadelphia. Someone wrote "Genuine Colored" across the top. The museum classifies it among its racist and stereotypical objects and keeps it as a record for studying racism.

Black actors fought for serious roles. In 1943 Paul Robeson became the first Black actor to play Shakespeare's Othello on Broadway. More than a century earlier, the African American actor Ira Aldridge had played the role in London. Robeson used the part to advance the struggle for racial equality. On 11 March 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, about a working-class Black family on Chicago's South Side, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It was the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, and its director, Lloyd Richards, was the first Black director of a Broadway show. In 1976 Ntozake Shange's choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf opened on Broadway, giving new space to Black women's experiences.

On screen

Hollywood long shut Black artists out or cast them as stereotypes such as the faithful "Mammy," and films such as The Birth of a Nation spread racist images. In response, a separate industry made films for Black audiences from the 1910s to the 1940s. Its leading figure was Oscar Micheaux, a former Pullman porter and South Dakota homesteader whom the New York Public Library calls the first African American feature filmmaker. His first film, The Homesteader, came out in 1919, and he is credited with 44 films by 1948. His Black characters were doctors, businessmen, detectives and lawyers, though critics faulted him for giving lead roles to light-skinned actors.

Recognition from Hollywood came slowly. At the Academy Awards ceremony of February 1940, Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for Gone with the Wind. In 1964 Sidney Poitier won Best Actor for Lilies of the Field. Behind the camera, the Black Stuntmen's Association, organized in 1967, ended the practice of "paint-downs," in which white stuntmen in dark makeup stood in for Black actors.

Television changed too. In the sitcom Julia, Diahann Carroll played a nurse, widow and single mother, one of the first portrayals of a Black professional woman on television. In 1969 she won a Golden Globe for the role. The popular Flip Wilson Show ran on NBC from 1970 to 1974, and Soul Train brought Black music and dance into millions of homes, including non-Black ones. Public affairs programs such as Black Journal covered topics from the Black Power movement to women's roles. In 1977 Roots, the miniseries drawn from Alex Haley's work, confronted viewers with the brutality of slavery.

The upshot: On stage and screen, Black artists moved from roles written to mock them toward telling their own stories. They also changed who worked behind the scenes as well as who appeared in front.

Common misconceptions

• Each style of Black music replaced the one before. Spirituals, blues, jazz, gospel, soul and hip-hop overlap and borrow from one another, and all are still performed.
• Hip-hop is only rap music. It is a culture with four elements: DJing, emceeing, breakdancing and graffiti.
• Black performers in minstrel shows chose to mock their own people. The museum explains that Black artists had to work within limits white society set on their opportunities; its 1879 contract shows a Black troupe in blackface paid by a share of the receipts.
• Black filmmaking began with Hollywood. Oscar Micheaux and others built a separate film industry for Black audiences from the 1910s.
• Music and politics stayed separate. From Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial to James Brown and Public Enemy, performance often carried protest and pride.

Pulling it together

• The Fisk Jubilee Singers left Nashville on 6 October 1871, saved their university and introduced the spirituals to the world.
• Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (1920) opened the market for blues records, and jazz grew from New Orleans' brass bands and Congo Square to Armstrong and bebop.
• Thomas Dorsey shaped gospel, Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, and Motown, founded in 1959, became a Black-owned hit factory.
• Hip-hop began at a Bronx party on 11 August 1973 and grew into a global culture of DJing, emceeing, breakdancing and graffiti.
• From minstrelsy to Micheaux, A Raisin in the Sun, Julia and Roots, Black artists fought to control how Black life appeared on stage and screen.

Sources

1. Fisk University. (n.d.). History. fisk.edu
2. NPR. (2006, November 11). Mamie Smith and the birth of the blues market. Weekend All Things Considered. npr.org
3. National Park Service. (n.d.). Early history of jazz. New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. nps.gov
4. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Musical Crossroads. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
5. Detroit Historical Society. (n.d.). Motown Records. Encyclopedia of Detroit. detroithistorical.org
6. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Black is beautiful: The emergence of Black culture and identity in the 60s and 70s. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
7. Ligon, T. L. (2023, August 11). "To the hip hop and you don't stop": A tribute for the 50th anniversary of hip hop. Rediscovering Black History, National Archives. archives.gov
8. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Contract for a Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels performance. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
9. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Taking the Stage. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
10. HISTORY.com Editors. (n.d.). A Raisin in the Sun debuts on Broadway. HISTORY. history.com
11. New York Public Library. (n.d.). Oscar Micheaux. Research guides, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. libguides.nypl.org
12. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (n.d.). The 12th Academy Awards, 1940. oscars.org
13. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (n.d.). The 36th Academy Awards, 1964. oscars.org

A news story, 1972

In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, began a study to record what syphilis does to the human body when it is left untreated. It enrolled 600 Black men: 399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that researchers never obtained the men's informed consent. They told the men they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term for several illnesses. In return the men received free medical exams, free meals and burial insurance. By 1943 penicillin was the standard treatment for syphilis, but the men were not offered it.

The study went on for forty years. Then, in 1972, an Associated Press story revealed it to the public. A federal advisory panel concluded that the study was "ethically unjustified," and in November 1972 the government ended it. In 1973 a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the men and their families led to a $10 million settlement in 1974. The government set up a program to provide medical care to the survivors, later extended to their wives, widows and children. The last participant died in January 2004.

On 16 May 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized at the White House:

The United States government did something that was wrong -- deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.

The Tuskegee study poses the problem of this lesson. In science, medicine and sport, Black Americans have been exploited and excluded, yet they have also led these fields and used them to demand change. How have they claimed a place in American knowledge, and imagined futures beyond the limits set for them?

Medicine and science: exploited, excluded and leading

Tuskegee was not the only case. In 1951 a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital took cells from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old Black woman with cervical cancer, without her knowledge or consent. She died that October. Her cells became HeLa, the world's first immortal human cell line. The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that they were central to the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, gene mapping and in-vitro fertilization. In 2017 the artist Kadir Nelson painted a portrait of her, now in the museum's collection. In it she holds a Bible, and two buttons are missing from her dress, a reference to the cells taken without her knowledge.

Unequal health outcomes continue. In 2023, the CDC reported, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths for every 100,000 live births. The rate was 14.5 for White women, 12.4 for Hispanic women and 10.7 for Asian women.

Black scientists also transformed their fields. The surgeon Charles Drew, born in Washington, D.C., in 1904, pioneered methods for collecting, storing and shipping blood plasma. In 1940 he directed the Blood for Britain program, which sent plasma to treat people wounded in the German bombing of Britain. He became the first medical director of American Red Cross blood services and introduced bloodmobiles. When the program separated blood by the donor's race, Drew condemned the policy as unscientific, since plasma is the same whatever the donor's race, and he resigned in 1942.

The mathematician Katherine Johnson, born in West Virginia in 1918, was one of the first three Black students chosen to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools in 1939. She joined the Langley laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which became NASA, in 1953. In 1962, before John Glenn's orbital flight, she checked by hand the computer calculations for his capsule's path. She later worked on Apollo missions to the Moon. In 2015, at the age of 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she died in 2020 at 101.

Worth holding on to: The same medical system that exploited the Tuskegee men and Henrietta Lacks depended on the work of Black scientists. The gaps it left behind can still be measured today.

Sport as a stage for protest

Black athletes have often been celebrated on the field and mistreated off it. Jack Johnson, boxing's first Black heavyweight champion, was convicted by an all-white jury in 1913 under the Mann Act, a law against taking women across state lines for "immoral" purposes. In 2018 he received a rare posthumous pardon. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Jesse Owens won four gold medals, the first American to do so in track and field at a single Games. Yet he still faced segregation when he came home. In 1947 Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in the twentieth-century major leagues. He helped the Brooklyn Dodgers win six National League pennants and a World Series, and after he retired he became a civil rights advocate.

Muhammad Ali, who won Olympic gold in boxing in 1960, later refused induction into the army, claiming to be a conscientious objector on religious grounds. He was convicted. In Clay v. United States, decided on 28 June 1971, the Supreme Court reversed his conviction. It found that his claim to be a conscientious objector had been denied without valid reasons, even though a hearing officer had found him sincere.

On 16 October 1968, at the Olympics in Mexico City, Tommie Smith won gold in the 200-meter sprint and John Carlos took bronze. On the medal stand they stood shoeless, each with a black glove on one hand, and raised their fists while the American anthem played. The museum, which holds Smith's uniform, explains that their black socks stood for the poverty of Black America and their bowed heads for prayer. The Australian silver medalist, Peter Norman, wore a badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in support. More recently, the swimmer Simone Manuel spoke out against racist stereotypes in her sport. In 2016 she had become the first Black woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in swimming.

Black Studies

Students fought to bring Black knowledge into universities. In 1968 and 1969 the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College led a six-month walkout known as the Third World Strike. Other students, faculty and community members joined them. They demanded departments of American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Black Studies and La Raza Studies within a College of Ethnic Studies. The strike produced the country's first College of Ethnic Studies. Black Studies grew into a full academic field. In 1988 Temple University opened the first doctoral program in African American Studies, carrying forward the work that Carter G. Woodson had begun with Negro History Week in 1926.

Afrofuturism: imagining Black futures

The National Museum of African American History and Culture describes Afrofuturism as art, creative work and activism that express Black identity, agency and freedom. It does so by imagining liberated futures for Black life. Its 2023-2024 exhibition traced the idea back more than a century. The museum treats Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), the free Black astronomer and almanac maker who challenged racist ideas, as a prototype of the Afrofuturist.

Music became a main voice of Afrofuturism with Sun Ra's cosmic-inspired jazz in the mid-1950s, and later with George Clinton's space-age funk bands, Parliament and Funkadelic. In literature, Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) wrote science fiction with Black women as heroic survivors, in books such as Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993). On screen, the museum points to Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, a record-breaking box office hit.

Worth holding on to: Black Studies and Afrofuturism both answer exclusion with creation. One built new fields of knowledge inside universities; the other imagined futures in which Black people are free.

Common misconceptions

• The Tuskegee men were injected with syphilis. The men already had the disease or were controls; the wrong was that researchers deceived them and withheld treatment, including penicillin after 1943.
• The Tuskegee study was secret and illegal from the start, so no one in government knew. It was run by the U.S. Public Health Service for forty years and ended only after a news story made it public.
• Black athletes stayed out of politics. From Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens to Muhammad Ali, Smith and Carlos and Simone Manuel, many used their fame to confront racism.
• Afrofuturism is just science fiction. The museum treats it as a way of expressing Black identity and freedom across music, art, fashion, film and activism.
• Black Studies began as a gift from universities. At San Francisco State it was won by a six-month student strike.

What you now know

• From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service studied 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, without their informed consent and withheld treatment; President Clinton apologized in 1997.
• Henrietta Lacks's cells, taken without consent in 1951, became HeLa, and Black maternal mortality in 2023 was more than three times the rate for White women.
• Charles Drew pioneered blood banking and condemned the segregation of blood; Katherine Johnson's calculations helped carry Americans into orbit and to the Moon.
• Athletes from Jack Johnson to Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Muhammad Ali turned sport into a stage for confronting racism.
• The San Francisco State strike of 1968-1969 won the first College of Ethnic Studies, and Afrofuturism, from Banneker and Sun Ra to Octavia Butler, imagined free Black futures.

Sources

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, September 4). The untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee timeline. cdc.gov
2. Clinton, W. J. (1997, May 16). Remarks by the President in apology for study done in Tuskegee. The White House. clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov
3. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Henrietta Lacks (HeLa): The mother of modern medicine [Painting by Kadir Nelson, 2017]. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
4. Hoyert, D. L. (2025, February). Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2023. NCHS Health E-Stats. National Center for Health Statistics. cdc.gov
5. American Red Cross. (n.d.). Dr. Charles Drew: In service of others. redcross.org
6. Patel, K. B., De La Cruz Quezada, K., Kalluri, A., Quezada, K. A., Musegue, D., Rodriguez, C., Plamoottil, A., Persaud, N. A., and Ganti, L. (2024). Charles R. Drew (1904-1950): A pioneer of blood banking. Cureus. PubMed Central. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
7. NASA. (n.d.). Katherine Johnson biography. Langley Research Center. nasa.gov
8. Associated Press. (2018, May 24). Trump pardons heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. KOAA News. koaa.com
9. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). African Americans at the Olympic Games. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
10. National Archives. (n.d.). Beyond the playing field: Jackie Robinson, civil rights advocate. Educator Resources. archives.gov
11. Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
12. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Team USA Olympic uniform singlet worn by Tommie Smith. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
13. College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. (n.d.). History. ethnicstudies.sfsu.edu
14. Temple University. (2008, April 14). African American studies doctoral program turns 20. Temple Now. now.temple.edu
15. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Afrofuturism: A history of Black futures. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu

Richmond, 8 September 2021

On the morning of 8 September 2021, a crowd in Richmond, Virginia, cheered and chanted as a crane lifted a 12-ton bronze statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee off its pedestal on Monument Avenue. The statue came off in one piece and went into storage. Governor Ralph Northam had announced its removal in June 2020, ten days after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off protests across the nation. Two lawsuits by residents who opposed removal delayed the work for more than a year, until rulings by the Supreme Court of Virginia cleared the way.

The statue had stood there since 1890. It was made in France by the sculptor Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié, and Encyclopedia Virginia records that a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 attended its dedication. According to the Associated Press, white residents celebrated the statue, but many Black residents had long seen it as a monument glorifying slavery. In 1996 a statue of the Black tennis champion Arthur Ashe was added to Monument Avenue despite serious opposition. The governor then was Douglas Wilder, the first Black person to serve as governor of any state since Reconstruction.

By 2021 the granite pedestal was covered in graffiti from the protests of 2020, and some racial justice activists wanted to keep it as a symbol of that movement. The scene raises this lesson's question. Public monuments, place names and museums tell a story about whom a nation honors. Who should decide that story, and how should it change? This lesson sets out the main positions in their own words. The course takes no side.

When and why the monuments went up

Many Confederate monuments were not built right after the Civil War. Encyclopedia Virginia notes that the years from the 1880s to the 1930s brought a retrenchment of white supremacy across the South. Those years saw Jim Crow laws, the disfranchisement of Black voters and thousands of lynchings. Monuments to Confederate leaders helped underscore Confederate heritage at the same time. For this reason, the encyclopedia explains, many historians see the statues as more than ways of remembering the war. They were also responses to the political issues of the early twentieth century. Charlottesville's Lee statue, for example, was unveiled in 1924, months after Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act and days after the local Ku Klux Klan paraded through the city.

The Defense Department has told a similar story about its bases. In 2023 its news service explained that some Army bases, built during the buildup to World War I, were named for Confederate officers to court support from Southern communities. It was also the height of Jim Crow, the department noted. No one considered the feelings of Black soldiers who had to serve at bases named for men who fought to defend slavery.

The core of it: Many monuments to the Confederacy are themselves historical evidence. They are evidence of the era that built them, the age of Jim Crow, as much as of the Civil War.

Charlottesville: a monument debate turns deadly

In 2016 a 15-year-old Charlottesville student, Zyahna Bryant, started a petition against the city's Lee statue, and the vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, proposed removing it. A city commission on race, memorials and public spaces recommended in December 2016 that the statue be moved to another park. In February 2017 the city council voted 3-2 to remove it. A group called the Monument Fund, the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and eleven individuals sued to stop the removal.

On 11 and 12 August 2017, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klan members and others rallied in the city. On 12 August, during clashes with counterprotesters, a man drove a car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Charlottesville resident, and injuring nineteen others. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The statue came down in July 2021. In December 2021 the council voted to donate it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The center proposed to melt it down and use the bronze for a new public artwork.

Four positions

The arguments in their own words

Supporters of removal point to the monuments' origins and meaning. The Defense Department's 2023 account of the Jim Crow-era base names, and Black residents' long view of the Lee statue as a monument to slavery, are examples. Congress created the Naming Commission in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021, overriding a presidential veto with large bipartisan majorities. The commission was to recommend new names for Defense Department items "that commemorate the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily" with it. In 2023 Fort Lee, Virginia, became Fort Gregg-Adams, honoring Lieutenant General Arthur J. Gregg and Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, became Fort Liberty.

Supporters of keeping or restoring monuments argue that removing them rewrites the past. In March 2025, Executive Order 14253 declared it the administration's policy:

to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.

The order directed the Secretary of the Interior to review monuments on Interior Department land that had been removed or changed since 1 January 2020. Those found to promote what the order called a false reconstruction of American history were to be reinstated. In 2025 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth renamed Fort Liberty as Fort Bragg and Fort Moore as Fort Benning. The Pentagon says the restored names now honor U.S. veterans who share the surnames of the Confederate officers, including Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a paratrooper who won the Silver Star in the Battle of the Bulge.

Critics answered. According to NPR, the Organization of American Historians, a group of about 6,000 historians, called the 2025 order an attack on museums, historic sites and historians themselves. It warned that the order could downplay slavery, segregation and discrimination and suppress the voices of excluded groups. A White House spokesman replied that the president was celebrating true American history instead of corrupting it with left-wing ideology.

Museums and the national story

Museums are part of the same debate. After President George W. Bush signed the law creating it in 2003, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall on 24 September 2016. Its building was designed by David Adjaye and Phil Freelon, and its founding director, Lonnie Bunch, called it a place for healing and reconciliation. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on 26 April 2018, the nation's first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching. It holds a steel monument for each county where a lynching took place. Nearby, its Legacy Museum stands on a site where enslaved people were once held.

The Smithsonian itself became a subject of dispute. Executive Order 14253 said the Institution had come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. It directed the Vice President, through his seat on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, to seek to remove what the order called improper ideology. In June 2025 the Board of Regents stated that Congress had created the Smithsonian in 1846 as an independent institution. It said it was committed to keeping the Smithsonian free from political or partisan influence and had directed the Secretary to review museum content. In July 2026 Executive Order 14416 cited a White House report on the National Museum of American History. It directed the National Park Service to place signs outside that museum presenting the report's findings.

The core of it: Debates over monuments and museums are debates over who decides the nation's story. Each side claims to defend accurate history, and each points to a different body of evidence.

Common misconceptions

• Confederate monuments were put up by veterans right after the war. Many were built between the 1880s and the 1930s, in the era of Jim Crow and disfranchisement.
• There are only two sides: tear down or keep. Communities have also relocated monuments, recast their metal into new art and added new monuments alongside old ones.
• The debate has been settled. Decisions keep changing: bases renamed in 2023 had new names in 2025, and a 2025 order called for restoring some monuments removed after 2020.
• The restored base names honor the original Confederate officers. The Pentagon says Fort Bragg and Fort Benning now honor U.S. veterans who share those surnames.
• Museums simply display facts and stay out of debate. Choices about what to show are contested, as the 2025 and 2026 executive orders and the Smithsonian Regents' response show.

The takeaway

• Richmond's Lee statue, erected in 1890, was removed on 8 September 2021 after more than a year of court fights.
• Many Confederate monuments and base names date from the Jim Crow era, according to historians and the Defense Department.
• Positions range from removal and relocation to adding new monuments and keeping or restoring old ones, and each is held by real communities and officials.
• Nine Army bases were renamed in 2023; in 2025 Fort Bragg and Fort Benning took back their old names, now honoring other soldiers, and an executive order called for restoring some monuments.
• The National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018) added new national memory, and museum content itself is now debated.

Sources

1. Georgia Public Broadcasting. (2021, September 9). Virginia's massive Robert E. Lee statue has been removed. gpb.org
2. Lavoie, D. (2021, September 6). Virginia is set to remove Richmond's Lee statue on Wednesday. Associated Press, via KSAT. ksat.com
3. Encyclopedia Virginia. (n.d.). A crowd of more than 100,000 attends the dedication of the equestrian Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond. Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
4. Encyclopedia Virginia. (n.d.). Robert E. Lee sculpture. Virginia Humanities. encyclopediavirginia.org
5. Garamone, J. (2023, January 5). DOD begins implementing Naming Commission recommendations. DOD News. war.gov
6. Lopez, C. T. (2025, March 7). Fort Liberty becomes Fort Bragg, renamed for Battle of Bulge hero. DOD News. war.gov
7. Executive Order 14253: Restoring truth and sanity to American history. (2025, March 27). Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents. govinfo.gov
8. Executive Order 14416: Restoring trust in the Smithsonian Institution. (2026, July 29). Federal Register, 91 FR 47925. federalregister.gov
9. Chappell, B. (2025, May 21). These 7 executive actions show how Trump wants to reshape American history. NPR, via OPB. opb.org
10. Smithsonian Institution. (2025, June 9). Smithsonian statement on Board of Regents and Secretary governance. si.edu
11. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (2016, February 2). National Museum of African American History and Culture to open Sept. 24. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
12. Equal Justice Initiative. (n.d.). Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice to open on April 26, 2018. eji.org

Juneteenth in the House, 2019

On 19 June 2019, Juneteenth, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Steve Cohen of Tennessee held a hearing on H.R. 40. Its full name was the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. Cohen explained that Representative John Conyers of Michigan had first introduced it thirty years earlier. Conyers reintroduced it in every Congress until he retired, and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas was now its lead sponsor. The bill's number recalled the promise of forty acres of land to freed people after the Civil War. The bill would not itself pay anyone. It would create a commission to study slavery, the role of federal and state governments in supporting slavery and discrimination, and their lingering effects. The commission would then recommend remedies.

The witnesses disagreed sharply. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that reparations were a question of inheritance. The nation, he pointed out, still honors treaties two centuries old, and it was still paying Civil War pensions in the twenty-first century. Slavery, he said, was followed by a century of terror and plunder, from convict leasing to redlining and an unequal G.I. Bill.

The writer Coleman Hughes, himself descended from people enslaved at Monticello, called the failure to compensate freed people after the Civil War one of the greatest injustices in American history. But he argued that paying all descendants of enslaved people would divide the country and put a price on ancestors' suffering. In his words, it would be "justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living." He urged help for people directly harmed under Jim Crow and action on present problems such as schools, policing and health care.

The hearing opens this lesson's three debates over repair and representation: reparations, affirmative action and voting rights. Each is set out below in the words and evidence of those who hold each view. The course endorses none of them.

Debate 1: Reparations

Supporters point out that the United States has paid reparations before. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 apologized for the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. According to the Justice Department, its program paid $20,000 each to 82,219 eligible survivors, more than $1.6 billion in all, before it closed in 1999. Congress has also apologized for slavery and Jim Crow: the House in 2008 and the Senate in 2009, as Hughes noted in his testimony.

States have studied the question too. In 2020 California enacted Assembly Bill 3121, creating a task force to study slavery and its lingering effects on African Americans. The task force was to recommend remedies, with special consideration for descendants of people enslaved in the United States. It issued its final report on 29 June 2023, proposing a comprehensive reparations plan. The state attorney general's office stresses that any program would have to be enacted by the legislature and approved by the governor.

Critics raise practical and moral objections. Some, like Hughes, argue that payments based on ancestry would help some well-off people while leaving out struggling Americans of other backgrounds. In their view, the money and political effort would be better spent on present needs. Others, such as the witness Burgess Owens, framed the debate as a struggle over how American history is told and taught.

So what? All the witnesses agreed that slavery and Jim Crow were wrong. The reparations debate is about who owes what to whom today, and how to measure it.

Debate 2: Affirmative action

Race-conscious policies grew out of the civil rights era. The political scientist Ira Katznelson has noted that President Lyndon Johnson called in 1965 for bold new efforts to close the gap between Black and white Americans. Katznelson argues that New Deal and G.I. Bill programs had earlier worked as a kind of affirmative action for white Americans, as an earlier lesson showed.

On 29 June 2023, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions programs of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded:

Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.

The Court added that nothing in its opinion stopped universities from considering an applicant's own discussion of how race had affected his or her life. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. She wrote that the decision "cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter." Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also dissented.

Public opinion was divided too. In a Pew Research Center survey taken that spring, 50 percent of Americans disapproved of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in admissions. Another 33 percent approved and 16 percent were not sure. Black Americans were split differently: 47 percent approved, 29 percent disapproved and 24 percent were not sure.

Debate 3: Voting rights

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 required places with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the act, as the National Archives notes. It was the formula that decided which states and localities were covered. Section 2 of the act, which bans voting discrimination anywhere, remained. In Allen v. Milligan, decided on 8 June 2023, the Court upheld a Section 2 challenge that required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.

Then, on 29 April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 majority held that Louisiana's new map, with a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Section 2 "was designed to enforce the Constitution -- not collide with it." The Court set stricter limits on when the law can require race-conscious districts. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting for three justices, called the ruling the "latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act." The National Constitution Center summarized the decision as narrowing states' ability to use race in drawing districts.

So what? All three debates turn on one question that runs through this course. A nation once wrote racial hierarchy into law. Should its laws now name race in order to repair the effects, or refuse to name race at all?

Common misconceptions

• H.R. 40 would pay reparations. It would create a commission to study slavery's legacy and recommend remedies.
• The United States has never paid reparations. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 paid $20,000 each to more than 82,000 Japanese American survivors of wartime incarceration.
• Black Americans hold one view on these questions. Coates and Hughes disagreed before Congress, and Pew found Black Americans divided on race-conscious admissions.
• The 2023 decision forbids any mention of race in college applications. The Court said applicants may still discuss how race has affected their lives.
• The Voting Rights Act has been repealed. Courts struck down its coverage formula in 2013 and narrowed Section 2 in 2026, but the act remains law.

Recap

• H.R. 40, first introduced by John Conyers in 1989, would create a commission to study reparations; at its 2019 hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates and Coleman Hughes set out opposing cases.
• The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 paid Japanese American survivors $20,000 each, and California's task force issued a reparations plan in 2023.
• In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions over sharp dissents.
• Shelby County v. Holder (2013) ended the preclearance formula; Allen v. Milligan (2023) upheld Section 2, and Louisiana v. Callais (2026) narrowed it.
• Each debate weighs repairing the effects of racial discrimination against the principle of treating people without regard to race.

Sources

1. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. (2019). H.R. 40 and the path to restorative justice: Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties (Serial No. 116-27). GovInfo. govinfo.gov
2. U.S. Department of Justice. (1999, February 19). Ten year program to compensate Japanese Americans interned during World War II closes its doors [Press release]. justice.gov
3. California Department of Justice. (n.d.). AB 3121: Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. oag.ca.gov
4. California Department of Justice. (2023). The California reparations report. oag.ca.gov
5. Katznelson, I. (n.d.). When affirmative action was white. History and Policy. historyandpolicy.org
6. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
7. Nadeem, R. (2023, June 8). More Americans disapprove than approve of colleges considering race, ethnicity in admissions decisions. Pew Research Center. pewresearch.org
8. National Archives. (n.d.). Voting Rights Act (1965). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
9. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
10. Office of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. (2025, February 12). Amid onslaught on DEI, Pressley, Booker, colleagues reintroduce historic reparations bill during Black History Month [Press release]. pressley.house.gov
11. Bomboy, S. (2026, April 30). The Supreme Court's Callais decision sets new framework for racial gerrymandering. National Constitution Center. constitutioncenter.org