Lawmakers are seeking to downplay the role that slavery played in the development of the United States, but history tells a different story.
Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375.
Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons
The question of what should happen to symbols of oppression has re-emerged a hot-button issue now that the graffiti-covered figure has moved to Bristol’s M Shed museum
Mural by Gabriel Marques, Dublin.
Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
It took black folk unimaginable resources of creativity, humanity, humour and generosity to detoxify the N-word for their own collective sanity.
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.
Tourists pose for pictures at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
NATALIJA GORMALOVA/AFP via Getty Images
In a rare series of interviews, the late Ghanaian leader spoke of how the country’s slave trade was revisited as a vehicle for economic development.
Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s sculpture dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Transatlantic slave trade on display in Montgomery, Alabama.
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The turn towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism in Western democracies makes it unlikely that former Western slave-trading nations will agree to reparations in the near future.
Statue of the Berbice slave revolt leader Kofi in Georgetown, Guyana.
David Stanley - Flickr/WikiMedia
The slave revolt in Berbice, modern-day Guyana, was unusual for its length and near success. So why are so few of the revolt’s documents in the Caribbean nation’s archives?
Slave memorial in Zanzibar.
Eye Ubiquitous/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Slave traders transformed human lives into profit-bearing opportunities – just like modern finance.
There are more than 3,600 territories in Brazil that are home to Quilombola, descendants of escaped slaves, but few hold titles to the land.
(Elielson Pereira da Silva)
If you want to know the extent of the slave trade from Liverpool, use the tools in this article.
Welsh weavers, here in traditional costume that would not have been known to some of the poorest weavers to benefit from slave-driven demand for cloth.
Detroit Publishing Co/Library of Congress