“At age twenty-eight, [Benjamin Banneker] the young clockmaker fell in love with Anola, a beautiful slave on a nearby plantation. He could marry her legally only if she were free, but her master refused to sell her to Banneker, saying, ‘I will never sell her to a Negro!’ Banneker devised an elaborate plan to steal […]
Read the rest of this entry »Plantation Food: Brazil vs. America
In her autobiography, Beverly Johnson discusses the cuisine she was introduced to when she was on a photo shoot in Brazil: “I always enjoyed tasting the local cuisine of every country I visited during my career…Brazil’s national dish is feijoada, a tasty stew that differs throughout the country, but where I was it comprised beans, […]
Read the rest of this entry »Black History Fact Of The Day
“For portions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York City housed the largest urban slave population in mainland North America, with more slaves than any other city on the continent. During those years, slaves composed more than one quarter of the labor force in the city and perhaps as much as one half of […]
Read the rest of this entry »African Slaves Built The Rice Industry
“South Carolina’s slave-plantation owners had known nothing about how to grow and irrigate rice. That knowledge was brought to the low country by Africans stolen from the Sierra Leone by the Royal African company of England. As the slaves produced the rice that made the plantation owners rich, their glistening backs bore the branded acronymn […]
Read the rest of this entry »African Slavery & The West Indies
“The West Indies was one of the last places on earth where enslaved Africans wanted to find themselves. Its system of bondage was especially brutal, and American planters found it a convenient dumping ground for troublesome slaves. Shipping a slave to the West Indies was like sentencing him to death. George Washington as one of […]
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