The pain of slavery echoes through James Green’s plainspoken words. “Friday,” the former Texas slave said, is my “unlucky-star day.” One Friday, decades earlier when he was about 12, his mother had ...

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged. By Jennifer Schuessler One day in 1855, a man ...

His account of bondage in Edenton described men flogged 100 times and doused with brandy to increase the pain, and white owners so cruel they whipped other people’s slaves for failing to tip their ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Nobody could wait for Colson Whitehead’s new book — including Oprah, so here it is, a month early. In a surprise announcement a week ago, Winfrey chose “The ...

Kari Winter, professor of global gender and sexuality studies, is writing a screenplay for a four-part television miniseries that she hopes will bring the life of Jeffrey Brace, an enslaved man who ...

The power of storytelling has always been at the heart of Black resistance. Long before social media activism and viral videos exposed injustice, enslaved Black Americans wielded their narratives as ...

In January, Little, Brown published Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s “Guantánamo Diary,” the first full accounting of the rendition and detainment of a person imprisoned at Guantánamo. Edited by Larry ...

A portait of Omar Ibn Said made around the 1850s Photo courtesy of Yale University Library Omar Ibn Said was leading a prosperous life in West Africa at the turn of the 19th century, devoting himself ...

The Florida Department of Education faced angry reaction from across the nation to new African American history standards suggesting some slaves benefited from skills they learned while enslaved.

One day in 1855, a man walked into a newspaper office in Sydney, Australia, with an odd request. The man, later described as a “man of color” with “bright, intelligent eyes” and an American accent, ...