Sublime

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

In the spring of 1971, Ma returned to Nyack College and helped form a Black student union, an organization that challenged racist theology, the Confederate flags on dorm-room doors, and the paucity of Black students and programming. She started wearing African-print dresses and wrapped her growing Afro in African-print ties. She dreamed of travelin

Wells was best known as a journalist for exposing the lies behind the justification for lynching. Negroes charged with recklessly eyeballing a White woman, or worse, were often people who had found prosperity and respect despite the constraints of Jim Crow. The lynchings put them back in their place. Wells nearly met a similar fate, but escaped as

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

Tapson Mawere, a revolutionary intellectual in the fight for Zimbabwean independence,

May the blessings of Emancipation extend throughout our unhappy land, and the illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman… and the distinction of color be forever consigned to oblivion [so] that we may live in bands of fraternal love, union and equality with the Almighty Nigger, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.