Tag: slavery

The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.

Author Jesmyn Ward sits down with Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss slavery, superheroes, and how much you have to hate yourself to enjoy being famous.

The singular singer released her groundbreaking album in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, and used her art and appearance as weapons in the Civil Rights struggle.

In the “bizarre and horrifying world” of the early modern Caribbean, maroons and pirates both prized their freedom above all else. And sometimes they worked together to safeguard it.

Why would a successful black woman move from the Bay Area back to Mississippi?

Adaobi Tricia Nwaumbani reveals her Igbo great-grandfather’s history with the transatlantic slave trade.

“Monticello was a Black space. People of African descent shaped the entire landscape: how the food tasted, what the place sounded and felt like.”

Why Kanye referenced a nonexistent slave owner.

Hill rice was supposed to be extinct, until a South Carolina chef stumbled on it — in Trinidad.

Documentary filmmaker Lance Warren interrogates the silence around lynching in the American South.

Founded 150 years ago by two former slaves, the United Order of Tents has come through for black communities when white-run organizations have failed to.

If craft food culture looks overwhelmingly white, it’s because black influences have been routinely scrubbed from its history.

For GQ, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah travels through the state that taught Roof a perverted viewpoint of the antebellum period.

“Once, when I was sick for a long time and too weak to eat, she chewed my food for me and put the small pieces in my mouth to swallow.”

“Get Off the Track!” borrowed the melody of a racist hit song and helped give a public voice to the abolitionist movement.

Ona Judge slipped out of the president’s house one night and didn’t come back. But unlike most runaway slaves, she was never caught.

The story of slavery in New York, the messy path to abolition, and a shameful history with which America has yet to come to terms.

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper […]

We must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken […]