Known as the military leader who saved America, Ulysses S. Grant left a legacy of fighting for the rights of enslaved people during and after the Civil War.
A depiction of an auction where an enslaved person is sold.
Getty Images
At a time when politicians across the country are debating how slavery in the US is taught, high school students are participating in mock slave auctions that are having severe consequences
A Texas law says slavery cannot be taught as part of the ‘true founding’ of the United States.
Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images
Known as Juneteenth in Texas, Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.
Reconstructed slave cabins at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia.
Stephen P. Hanna
Once owned by James Madison, the Montpelier plantation remains a model for presenting a full depiction of the life of the former president as well as the lives of those he enslaved.
A portrait of Harriet Tubman in 1878.
Library of Congress/Getty Images
Harriet Tubman has long been known as a conductor on the Underground Railroad leading enslaved Black people to freedom. Less known is her role as a Union spy during the Civil War.
Hundreds of plantation museums dot the South.
Amy Potter
Plantation museums could be ideal venues for students to learn about the nation’s history of race-based slavery, but only if they stop whitewashing the horrors of what took place on their grounds.
In this rare photograph taken in 2000, prisoners at the Ferguson Unit in Texas are seen working in the prison’s cotton fields.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
The 13th Amendment is given credit for freeing an estimated 4 million enslaved people during the Civil War era. It also enabled a prison system of free labor and involuntary servitude.
Harvesting on a Louisiana sugar plantation, 1875.
Alfred R. Waud/Library of Congress
Sugar has deep links with slavery in the US, but Black workers weren’t the only ones affected. In post-Civil War Louisiana, Chinese workers also toiled cutting and processing cane.
The enslaved people who produced sugar before the Civil War did dangerous and grueling work.
The Print Collector/Getty Images
Before the Civil War, US activists sought to combat slavery through sugar boycotts. Instead, consumption grew.
These statues of enslaved young boys are part of a modern-day depiction of southern plantation life at the Whitney Museum in Louisiana.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
The romanticized notions of Southern gentility are increasingly at odds with historical reality as the lives, culture and contributions of the enslaved are becoming integral on tours of plantations.
Engraving of James McCune Smith by Patrick H. Reason.
New York Historical Society
James McCune Smith was the first African American to receive a medical doctorate from a university. He dedicated his life to fighting injustice.
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.
U.S. teachers often struggle to depict the realities of slavery in America.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Few issues are as difficult to deal with in the classroom as slavery in the US. Here, a professor who trains teachers on how to present the topic offers some insights.
Thuso Mbedu is plays Cora in The Underground Railroad, a woman on the run to freedom in the north of the US.
Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios
At once tender and horrific, The Underground Railroad’s use of visuals and sound beautifully portray the reality of slavery and its legacy in the US today.
Some ancient theologians argued that the Israelites deserved a share of Egypt’s wealth after being enslaved for centuries.
Culture Club/Hulton Archive via 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?
Jubilee singers at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, pose for
promotional photograph, circa 1871.
William L. Clements Library
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.