History
To fully face the present, we must know our history. In this country, our stories are silenced and the history books tell someone else's narrative. Here are some resources that will help you understand where we came from and how we got to where we are.
READ:
A Brief History of Slavery from New York Times
Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with a hull filled with human cargo: captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa. The men, women and children, most likely from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, endured the horrific journey, bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico.
History of slavery From History Channel
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies, and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War.
The half has never been told
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution — the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in the prizewinning The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
Black/Asian Solidarity
Resources from Cross Cultural Solidarity related to contemporary and historical solidarities, as well as a section on books about Black American historical connections with Asia. The goal is to build out a major series on both Black and Latino freedom struggles, and to do the same for Asian and Native American freedom struggles in 2022.
WATCH:
12 years a slave
Before the Civil War in the United States, Solomon Northup, a free Black man from Saratoga Springs, New York, is kidnapped and sold as a slave to a malevolent southern owner.
Harriet
The story of Harriet Tubman, who ran valiant missions to free slaves, having escaped herself in 1849.