The first permanent English settlement in the North Americas was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Several scholars have noted that when the first slave ships arrived in Jamestown in 1619, black people served no differently than white bondservants and, consequently, the markers of slavery were not immediately linked to a bodily difference. Further, the word slave initially held no meaning in the English legal system; black subjects were regarded merely as servants.
Read moreA Brief History of Transatlantic Slavery
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enslaved men, women, and children were culled from West African ethnocultural communities of the Wolof, Mandingo, Mende and Yoruba. In his examination of Africa before the transatlantic slave trade John Thornton points out that there existed a bustling economic exchange between Africa and Europe.
Read moreWomen's History Month: The "New Negro Woman" in the 1920s
Between 1900 and 1930 blacks in North America were venturing into new territories in terms of migration, education, employment, and the arts. The United States witnessed a massive internal migration of African Americans out of the South and into northern cities; in particular, New York and Chicago grew exponentially.
Read morePicturing What It Means To Be Free
Ernest Withers’s photograph of the sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968 is similarly well known today. It is often interpreted as an imagined future. It records Black workers’ mass walkout in February 1968 and their infamous placards that read “I AM A MAN” in protest against discriminatory treatment and life-threatening working conditions. With their disparate clothing and physiques, the men were united by their race and their declaration of shared identity – as men.
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