Perth’s City of Stirling, which honours James Stirling, is considering a name change. New research shows how Stirling’s family’s wealth was built on the back of slavery business.
South Sea Islander children in Queensland, around 1902-05.
Queensland State Library
Australia’s use of Pacific Islander workers in the late 19th century was part of a much bigger story of British sugar barons and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Making the series changed Barry Jenkins’ views on how his ancestors should be described and depicted.
Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon Studios
Director Barry Jenkins’ delicate dance with beauty and suffering seeks to create a fuller picture of the world Black Americans – then and now – inhabit.
An Afrikaner family from the 1930s. Scientific analyses are unpacking Afrikaners’ genetic origins.
Jaco Greeff
Given the central role that ethnicity played and still plays in South African politics, it is good to have an unbiased estimate of Afrikaners’ genetic history.
Soul and R&B legend Sam Moore performs at the 2009 Nakusp Music Festival in Nakusp, B.C.
(Richard Vignola/Flickr)
There is a history of exploiting Black musicians in the United States that dates back to slavery. But movements like Black Lives Matters are working towards economic justice.
If teachers don’t accept the challenge of proactively educating children about racist language, young people may not understand its hurtful impact. And they may take this ignorance into adulthood.
An abolitionist lithograph of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Capitol in the background.
Library of Congress
Riots by proslavery forces raged for three days in the nation’s capital after the capture of a ship bearing fugitive enslaved people. The president, a slaveowner himself, tried to calm the city.
Medieval Christians believed that heaven was a realm filled with dancing. Italian painter Fra Angelico’s ‘Last Judgment’ showing dancing angels.
Fra Angelico's Last Judgment/Wikimedia
Texas’ most famous statesman, Sam Houston, was a slave owner who opposed the Confederacy. But white Texans tend to omit his dissent in current debates over removing Confederate markers.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading fresh efforts in Congress to address reparations.
Al Drago/Getty Images
Anne C. Bailey, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?
Students at Georgetown University protest in 2019, demanding the school make amends for its history with reparations.
Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images
History is full of examples of nations paying out to compensate for slavery. But the money never went to those who suffered under the system, only those who profited.
An early 20th-century NAACP map showing lynchings between 1909 and 1918. The maps were sent to politicians and newspapers in an effort to spur legislation protecting Black Americans.
Library of Congress
Mapping is one way African Americans fight for equality and help each other navigate a racially hostile landscape.
Like the best myths, the tale of Igbo Landing and the flying African seems to transcend boundaries of time and space.
Victor_Tongdee/iStock via Getty Images
The myth has become a symbol of the traumatizing legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery. It also serves as a form of resistance and healing.
Activists stand together during a demonstration against the slave trade and human trafficking.
Photo credit should read GULSHAN KHAN/AFP via Getty Images
Marie Rodet, SOAS, University of London; Bakary Camara, Université des sciences juridiques et politiques de Bamako, and Lotte Pelckmans, University of Copenhagen
Descent-based slavery – when a slave status is ascribed to a person based on their alleged ancestry – continues to exist in Mali.
Abolitionist John Brown, left, and President Abraham Lincoln, right, were both moral crusaders.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images & Stock Montage/Getty Images
President Lincoln was a statesman. John Brown was a radical. That’s the traditional view of how each one fought slavery, but it fails to capture the full measure of their devotion.
The Port of Savannah used to export cotton picked by enslaved laborers and brought from Alabama to Georgia on slave-built railways. Cotton is still a top product processed through this port.
Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Geographers are documenting slave-built infrastructure, from railroads to ports, in use today. Such work could influence the reparations debate by showing how slavery still props up the US economy.
Bill Robinson dancing with Shirley Temple in ‘The Little Colonel.’
(20th Century Fox)
‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ the best seller of the 19th century, is not a relic from the past. The complex Uncle Tom figure still has a hold over Black politics.
Tourists pose for pictures at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
NATALIJA GORMALOVA/AFP via Getty Images
Supply chain transparency is important, but countries like Australia also must do more to support the justice process, such as securing compensation for fishermen and putting traffickers in jail.