Studying local Africans’ contributions to the abolition of slavery provides a fuller understanding of its history.
A painting depicting Francis Scott Key aboard the British ship HMS Tonnant viewing Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore on Sept. 14, 1814.
Ed Vebell/Getty Images
Few people embody the contradictions of U.S. history like the author of the Star Spangled Banner, someone who denounced slavery as a moral wrong but rejected racial equality.
Jubilee singers at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, pose for
promotional photograph, circa 1871.
William L. Clements Library
The abolitionist’s legacy is often molded to fit various political agendas. Yet the Brown who appears in Showtime’s new miniseries is one we haven’t seen before.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II speaks outside of the St. John’s Episcopal Church Lafayette Square on June 14, 2020.
Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Two men were convicted in 1859 of violating the Fugitive Slave Act. They had rescued a runaway slave from slave hunters in Ohio, one of the small acts of resistance that led to the Civil War.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa opposes capital punishment.
EPA-EFE/Aaron Ufumeli
Robert Sobukwe developed the philosophy of African nationalism to even higher intellectual heights. The lesson for humanity was his ideological stand that there is only one race - the human race.
2019 - 2021 Joyce Bonk Fellow at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan and current graduate student at U-M School of Information, University of Michigan