Eighteenth-century Quakers attempted to align their religious beliefs with what they purchased. These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.
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.
Jean Marcellis Destine, dressed as Haitian independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, heads to a protest against President Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 4, 2019.
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who freed Haiti from French colonial rule in 1804, is revered as a spirit in the Haitian religion. Now he’s become an icon of the uprising against President Jovanel Moïse.
Slavery is not so far removed. Anderson and Minerva Edwards met in the 1860s as enslaved laborers in Texas, had 16 children and lived into their 90s in a cabin a few miles from the plantations they once worked. They are photographed here in 1937.
U.S. Library of Congress
Old injustices don’t simply disappear with time – they tear a nation apart.
Chen Yabian, 74, of Hainan Province, southern China, testifies during the International Symposium on Chinese ‘Comfort Women’ in 2000 in Shanghai that she was 14 when Japanese Imperial Army soldiers forced her to work as a sex slave during the war.
AP/Eugene Hoshiko
US agreements with Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria provide reparations to WWII victims. But an international law scholar writes that the US has failed to address war crimes in Asia.
Global supply chains have struggled to deal with poor working conditions including child labour, forced labour and debt slavery.
Shutterstock
The slave trade was used to fund American universities. Scholars are looking to recover the lost stories of the enslaved humans who built some of America’s oldest institutions.