The archive
Every essay starts with a question, claim, or myth—and follows the historical evidence. Explore Black history through research, context, and stories that resist easy answers. Browse by topic below.
Fighting for freedom, preserving African heritage
From the early 1500s, enslaved Africans in Venezuela worked in mining and agriculture, escaped to build their own communities, rose up at Coro in 1795, and sustained African traditions that their descendants continue to defend.
Kittie Knox's experience with racial discrimination and her efforts to continue participating in the sport.
Kittie Knox joined the League of American Wheelmen in 1893. When the league restricted new membership to white people the next year, her eligibility was questioned, and she kept presenting her credentials and riding.
During the 19th and 20th centuries: the businesses they developed and the opportunities they created for their communities.
Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Robert Reed Church Sr., Annie Turnbo Malone, and Madam C. J. Walker built fortunes in finance, real estate, and hair care despite discrimination, then used their resources to support education, employment, and community institutions.
From Atlanta's 1881 washerwomen to a six-year strike in Las Vegas, Black women organized for higher wages, shorter hours, and greater control over their work — and often had to fight discrimination inside the unions they built.
How Black families organized, raised money, and created places for their children to learn.
From an 1834 petition in Rochester to thousands of Rosenwald schoolhouses across the South, Black families pooled what little they had to build schools for their children — and the results narrowed the education gap for a generation.
How the Freedman’s Bank cost newly freed Black Americans their savings.
More than 70,000 Black depositors placed over $57 million into the Freedman’s Bank. When it collapsed in 1874, nearly $3 million in savings was lost — and many depositors never recovered their money.
Enslaved Black people also escaped into Mexico.
Freedom was not only north. Enslaved people in the Deep South and Texas escaped into Mexico, where crossing the Rio Grande placed them beyond the legal reach of American slavery.
The history of Black people in the West began centuries before American westward expansion.
From Esteban in 1528 to the Exodusters, Black women builders of the West, and Oklahoma’s Black towns, this visual essay traces a Black western history that started long before the Civil War.
But the history is more complicated than that.
Historians have identified both benevolent and exploitative motives behind Black slaveholding. This visual essay walks through the debate, the examples, and what the 1830 Census numbers actually say.
Unpacking what made racial slavery different.
Yes, slavery existed long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This visual essay traces how slavery in Europe changed over centuries and how Blackness and African ancestry eventually became written into law.
Movement, migration, and settlement across the premodern world.
African merchants, sailors, soldiers, rulers, diplomats and scholars across the Indian Ocean world, South Asia and Renaissance Europe, c. 200–1600 CE.
Maroon Legends, Vol. 1.
Comic-style profiles of maroon leaders across the Americas: Bayano in Panama, Yanga in Veracruz, Queen Nanny in Jamaica, Mackandal in Saint-Domingue, Zumbi in Palmares, and Illescas in Esmeraldas.
The complicated history of Black and Indigenous America.
African-descended and Indigenous people encountered one another for centuries. Their relationships included family, intermarriage, refuge, trade, resistance, conflict, enslavement, and slave catching.
Slavery was never just a Southern phenomenon.
Slavery was never just a Southern phenomenon. This visual essay follows the evidence for Northern slavery and its economy.
Slavery in colonial Canada, c. 1629–1834.
Canada is remembered as the destination of the Underground Railroad. But that is only part of the story.
The Stono Rebellion, 1739.
In 1739, enslaved Africans in South Carolina armed themselves, organized a rebellion and attempted to reach freedom in Spanish Florida.
The invention of race-based slavery.
Black and white laborers in the British colonies started out under the same legal status.
In January 1811, hundreds of enslaved people in Louisiana organized, armed themselves, and marched toward freedom in one of the largest slave uprisings in U.S. history.
The racial contradictions behind the rise of the early Republican Party, 1854–1865.
The early Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery, but that did not mean Republicans agreed on Black citizenship or racial equality. This visual essay examines those contradictions through historical scholarship and primary sources.
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