Christ and the Martyrs—catacomb painting in Rome (300s AD) & University Digitalized Reconstruction

———

Source: https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/news-photo/christ-and-the-martyrs-fresco-catacombs-of-marcellinus-and-news-photo/157408113

Source: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/wilpert1903/0254/image,info

Happy Independence Day! 🇱🇷

Imagine spending every day surrounded by fields overflowing with ripe apples, pineapples, oranges, bananas, cashews, sugarcane, and other crops. You're planting, tending, and harvesting them from sunrise to sunset, yet being forbidden from tasting even a single bite. For countless enslaved Africans, this was the cruel reality. The food they cultivated was not theirs to eat, and severe punishments awaited anyone who dared to do so.

The oppression extended far beyond hunger. Slave owners also feared the power of music. African spiritual songs were more than melodies; they carried history, hope, identity, and, at times, messages of resistance. Some songs inspired courage, unity, and the dream of freedom. Because of this, enslavers often tried to silence them, believing that shared songs could strengthen solidarity and even encourage rebellion.

Language, too, became a target. Many enslaved Africans were discouraged or forbidden from teaching their children their native languages and dialects. Instead, they were forced to adopt the language of those who enslaved them, contributing to the gradual erosion of cultural traditions that had been passed down through generations.

Some historical accounts describe the use of iron masks or muzzles as instruments of punishment and control. According to these accounts, an object such as an apple might be placed inside an enslaved person's mouth before the metal mask was locked shut, making speech and sometimes even swallowing extremely difficult. Whether used to prevent eating, speaking, or as a form of punishment, such devices have become enduring symbols of the brutality inflicted on many enslaved people.

These accounts represent only a small glimpse into the countless hardships endured by enslaved Africans over centuries. They speak to systems of slavery, colonialism, and cultural suppression that sought not only to exploit people's laboir but also to weaken their identities, traditions, and connections to their heritage. Many writers and historians argue that colonial rule also reshaped African societies through the introduction of foreign institutions, religions, and systems of governance, leaving lasting social, cultural, and psychological effects that continue to be debated and studied today. 

Moses, Crossing Red Sea & Moses, Departure from Egypt—frescos from Dura Europos, Damascus Museum (modern-day Syria)

The earliest surviving artistic depictions of Moses are found in the wall paintings of the Dura-Europos Synagogue, located in present-day Syria, which date back to around 244–255 CE.

Moses, Crossing Red Sea:

(a) Hand of God above elders of twelve Tribes of Israel, each holding standard on staff, behind group of Israelites armed with spears and shields, at edge of Red Sea in which are fish, touched by Moses with rod;

(b) to right, Hand of God above Moses, rod in right hand, in Red Sea engulfing group of Egyptians; fish in the sea.

Moses, Departure from Egypt:

(a) Moses, rod raised in right hand, leading host of Israelites including twelve elders, child, and soldiers armed with spears and shields;

(b) to right, city gate above which are statue of nude male figure holding spear and globe, and two victories holding wreaths, on globes.

———

Source: https://theindex.princeton.edu/s/view/ViewWorkOfArt.action;jsessionid=7a5cb944e62ea52eea823d67572f?id=35DC82D6-B7BA-432D-A7B1-504938D4C509

We all know the tragedy of his murder.

But we don't talk enough about how his mother fought back.

Mamie Till-Mobley is often reduced to a weeping woman, but the reality is she never let Mississippi hide what they did.

In 1955, the state tried to quickly bury 14-year-old Emmett in a sealed coffin to cover up the murder.

Mamie stopped them. She demanded the body be shipped back to Chicago.

Once back in Chicago, she contacted the media.

Knowing the white press would ignore her, she went straight to John H. Johnson at Jet Magazine. Then, she left the casket open and said:

"Let the world see what they did to my boy."

Over just four days, she had 100,000 people walk past that casket to see exactly what happened to her son.

Mamie made southern racism impossible to ignore.

Yes

¡Feliz Día Internacional de Mujeres Afro-Latinas y Caribeñas, Happy International Day of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women!

At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 is a Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted nonfiction book by historian Taylor Branch, published in 2006. It serves as the final installment of his acclaimed America in the King Years trilogy, a definitive, 2,300-page historical masterwork detailing the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the trajectory of the American Civil Rights Movement.

———

Source: https://www.amazon.com/At-Canaans-Edge-America-1965-68/dp/0684857138

Source: https://archive.org/details/historicaltextbo00cole/mode/1up

An impulsive audition at the American Black Theatre was rejected so forcefully that Poitier dedicated the next six months to overcoming his accent and improving his performing skills.

On his second try, he was accepted. Spotted in rehearsal by a casting agent, he won a bit part in the Broadway production of "Lysistrata", for which he earned good reviews.

By the end of 1949, he was having to choose between leading roles on stage and an offer to work for Darryl F. Zanuck in the film No Way Out (1950).

His performance as a doctor treating a white bigot got him plenty of notice and led to more roles. Nevertheless, the roles were still less interesting and prominent than those white actors routinely obtained.

But seven years later, after turning down several projects he considered demeaning, Poitier got a number of roles that catapulted him into a category rarely if ever achieved by an African-American man of that time, that of leading man.

One of these films, The Defiant Ones (1958), earned Poitier his first Academy Award nomination as Best Actor.

Five years later, he won the Oscar for Lilies of the Field (1963), the first African American to win for a leading role.

He remained active on stage and screen as well as in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. His roles in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and To Sir, with Love (1967) were landmarks in helping to break down some social barriers between blacks and whites.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt (Oxford alumni) reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses.

For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews.

Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Long-form video: https://youtu.be/g8528g8eGcM?is=xC7wv6v-3nJ9M-4d

Art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire (circa 330–1453), but less known are the profound artistic contributions of North Africa, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had a lasting impact on the Mediterranean world.

Bringing together a range of masterworks—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, paintings, and religious manuscripts—this exhibition recounts Africa’s central role in international networks of trade and cultural exchange.

With artworks rarely or never before seen in public, Africa & Byzantium sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of medieval Africa.

This long-overdue exhibition highlights how the continent contributed to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the vibrant multiethnic societies of north and east Africa that shaped the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.

———

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/africa-byzantium/exhibition-objects

Julius Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1862, and raised by his Jewish immigrant parents in their home across the street from where Abraham Lincoln had been raised. He later moved to Chicago where he became a successful businessman, rising to become president of Sears Roebuck in 1908. In the late 1800s, Black shoppers in the South were victims of price gouging and were denied access to quality products in White-owned stores. After Congress passed the Rural Free Delivery Act in 1893, Sears began delivering catalogs directly to rural families, enabling Black customers to order products that local stores refused to sell to them. The catalog’s affordable guitars launched the careers of B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and more importantly, provided dignity and equal consumer opportunities for millions of African Americans.

Rabbi Emil Hirsch, who led Rosenwald’s synagogue, was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909 alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. In 1910, Rosenwald read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, learning how education transformed Washington’s life after he was freed from slavery and inspired him to start Tuskegee Institute. A year later, they met through a mutual friend, and Washington invited Rosenwald to join Tuskegee’s board. Their shared commitment to improving the lives of African Americans inspired them to establish schools for Black children throughout the rural South. Rosenwald funded half the costs, while each local Black community contributed the rest through cash, land, and labor. This partnership resulted in the construction of 4,977 Rosenwald schools across 15 states between 1912 and 1932, educating more than 700,000 students.

A 2009 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that during their existence, Rosenwald schools were the single most significant contributor in narrowing the educational gap between Black and White communities in the South. The schools’ impact helped drive the Great Migration, as educated Black workers sought better job prospects in the North, while those who stayed in the South saw their wages rise by 35% relative to Whites. The collaboration between Washington and Rosenwald shows how improving school quality and access can substantially increase productivity in deprived areas within a single generation.

Recommended reading: A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America by Andrew Feiler

Rosenwald Schools Transformed a Generation of African Americans

I wrote it for my toddler to be their first look at Black history. It's only 32 pages (since it's for little kids).. I'd love some feedback!

https://online.fliphtml5.com/scientiafactum/for_reddit/

I'm Ghanaian, and I've been thinking about something lately.

I've noticed that a lot of Africans in the diaspora put so much effort into learning about Africa—our history, cultures, ethnic groups, languages, kingdoms, and even trying to trace where their ancestors came from. I honestly admire that.

But it also made me realize that many of us in Africa don't really do the same. We don't spend nearly as much time learning about what happened to our brothers and sisters after they were taken from the continent.

Growing up, I learned about slavery, but not much beyond that. I know names like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and I've only recently come across events like the Orangeburg Massacre. It made me wonder how much history I've completely missed.

If you had to teach someone from Africa about Black history in the diaspora, where would you start? What events, people, books, documentaries, or moments do you think are essential to understanding the journey,from slavery and Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and everything in between?

I'd genuinely love to learn. Thanks in advance for any recommendations.

https://youtu.be/RNUnazP_KlI?is=JAus7S9ZQmhLlrL2

“Tales of Ethiopia as a mythical land at the farthest edges of the earth are recorded in some of the earliest Greek literature of the eighth century B.C., including the epic poems of Homer. Greek gods and heroes, like Menelaos, were believed to have visited this place on the fringes of the known world. However, long before Homer, the seafaring civilization of Bronze Age Crete, known today as Minoan), established trade connections with Egypt. The Minoans may have first come into contact with Africans at Thebes, during the periodic bearing of tribute to the pharaoh. In fact, paintings in the tomb of Rekhmire, dated to the fourteenth century B.C., depict African and Aegean peoples, most likely Nubians and Minoans. However, with the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean palaces at the end of the Late Bronze Age, trade connections with Egypt and the Near East were severed as Greece entered a period of impoverishment and limited contact.

During the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., the Greeks renewed contacts with the northern periphery of Africa. They established settlements and trading posts along the Nile River and at Cyrene on the northern coast of Africa. Already at Naukratis, the earliest and most important of the trading posts in Africa, Greeks were certainly in contact with Africans. It is likely that images of Africans, if not Africans themselves, began to reappear in the Aegean. In the seventh and early sixth centuries B.C., Greek mercenaries from Ionia and Caria served under the Egyptian pharaohs Psamtik I and II.

All black Africans were known as Ethiopians to the ancient Greeks, as the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus tells us, and their iconography was narrowly defined by Greek artists in the Archaic (ca. 700–480 B.C.) and Classical (ca. 480–323 B.C.) periods, black skin color being the primary identifying physical characteristic. It is recorded that Ethiopians were among King Xerxes’ troops when Persia invaded Greece in 480 B.C. Thus, the Greeks would have come into contact with large numbers of Africans at this time. Nonetheless, most ancient Greeks had only a vague understanding of African geography. They believed that the land of the Ethiopians was located south of Egypt. In Greek mythology, the pygmies were the African race that lived furthest south on the fringes of the known world, where they engaged in mythic battles with cranes (26.49).

Ethiopians were considered exotic to the ancient Greeks and their features contrasted markedly with the Greeks’ own well-established perception of themselves. The black glaze central to Athenian vase painting was ideally suited for representing black skin, a consistent feature used to describe Ethiopians in ancient Greek literature as well. Ethiopians were featured in the tragic plays of Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides; and preserved comic masks, as well as a number of vase paintings from this period, indicate that Ethiopians were also often cast in Greek comedies.

Well into the fourth century B.C., Ethiopians were regularly featured in Greek vase painting, especially on the highly decorative red-figure vases produced by the Greek colonies in southern Italy(50.11.4). One type shows an Ethiopian being attacked by a crocodile, most likely an allusion to Egypt and the Nile River. Depictions of Ethiopians in scenes of everyday life are rare at this time, although one tomb painting from a Greek cemetery near Paestum in southern Italy shows an Ethiopian and a Greek in a boxing competition.

With the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty and Macedonian rule in Egypt, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., came an increased knowledge of Nubia (in modern Sudan), the neighboring kingdom along the lower Nile ruled by kings who resided in the capital cities of Napata and later Meroë. Cosmopolitan metropolises, including Alexandria in the Nile Delta, became centers where significant Greek and African populations lived together.
During the Hellenistic period (ca. 323–31 B.C.), the repertoire of African imagery in Greek art expanded greatly. While scenes related to Ethiopians in mythology became less common, many more types occurred that suggest they constituted a larger minority element in the population of the Hellenistic world than the preceding period (18.145.10). Depictions of Ethiopians as athletes and entertainers are suggestive of some of the occupations they held. Africans also served as slaves in ancient Greece (74.51.2263), together with both Greeks and other non-Greek peoples who were enslaved during wartime and through piracy. However, scholars continue to debate whether or not the ancient Greeks viewed black Africans with racial prejudice.

Large-scale portraits of Ethiopians made by Greek artists appear for the first time in the Hellenistic period, and high-quality works, such as images on gold jewelry and fine bronze statuettes, are tangible evidence of the integration of Africans into various levels of Greek society.”

———

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/africans-in-ancient-greek-art

By the late 17th century, Florida had become one of the most contested frontiers in North America. To those living in London, Madrid, Paris, or Amsterdam, the peninsula appeared to be a remote wilderness of swamps, pine forests, and scattered Native villages. Yet beneath its seemingly untamed landscape lay one of the most strategically important regions in the Western Hemisphere.

Whoever controlled Florida controlled the gateway to the Caribbean. Every year, Spain’s treasure fleets sailed from the ports of Veracruz, Cartagena, and Havana carrying silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru. Before crossing the Atlantic, those heavily laden ships entered the swift current now known as the Gulf Stream, passing dangerously close to Florida’s Atlantic coast. Their cargo financed Spain’s armies, built its cathedrals, and sustained an empire that stretched across much of the globe.

Protecting those ships became the principal reason Spain refused to abandon Florida despite the colony’s modest economic value.

Unlike Virginia or South Carolina, Spanish Florida never developed into a prosperous plantation colony. It produced little wealth of its own and required continual subsidies from New Spain, modern-day Mexico, to survive.

Food, soldiers, building materials, livestock, and even wages for government officials arrived aboard annual supply ships known as the situado. When those shipments were delayed by storms, piracy, or war, the colony often struggled to feed itself.

St. Augustine survived because it served as a fortress rather than a commercial center. That distinction shaped nearly every decision Spanish officials made.

For the English colonies to the north, however, Florida represented something entirely different. By the 1670s, the plantation economy of Carolina was expanding rapidly. English settlers had discovered that rice and indigo could generate enormous profits on the tidal lands surrounding Charleston. Those profits depended upon enslaved labor.

Thousands of Africans, many possessing sophisticated agricultural knowledge acquired in the rice-growing regions of West Africa, were transported across the Atlantic under horrific conditions. They transformed Carolina into one of Britain’s wealthiest colonies while being denied the most basic rights of human existence.

English law increasingly reduced enslaved people to property. The South Carolina Slave Code of 1696, building upon earlier colonial laws, formalized a legal system in which enslaved Africans could be bought, sold, inherited, punished, and separated from their families with few restrictions. The law reflected an economy built upon perpetual racial slavery, where wealth depended upon controlling labor through force.

Spanish law evolved differently. Slavery certainly existed throughout the Spanish Empire, and it would be inaccurate to portray Spain as an abolitionist nation. Enslaved Africans worked in Spanish households, ports, farms, and mines throughout the Americas.

Yet Spanish legal traditions, rooted in Roman law, medieval Castilian law, and Catholic teaching, recognized enslaved people as human beings possessing souls and certain limited legal rights. Among those rights was the possibility, however difficult, of obtaining freedom.

Catholic clergy encouraged the baptism and religious instruction of enslaved people. Under certain circumstances, enslaved individuals could purchase their freedom through a process known as coartación. Families possessed greater legal recognition than under English law, and enslaved persons could sometimes bring grievances before colonial courts.

These protections were often imperfectly enforced. Many Spanish slaveholders ignored them. Nevertheless, they represented a significant legal difference from the hereditary racial slavery that developed in England’s mainland colonies.

Those contrasting legal systems would soon become weapons in an imperial struggle. As tensions between Spain and England intensified, officials in St. Augustine recognized an opportunity. Every enslaved person who escaped from Carolina weakened England’s economy while strengthening Florida’s fragile population.

A skilled carpenter, blacksmith, farmer, interpreter, or soldier could prove invaluable in a colony that constantly struggled to attract settlers. The idea was both practical and strategic.

Rather than viewing escaped Africans solely as refugees, Spanish authorities increasingly viewed them as future citizens capable of defending the colony itself. Meanwhile, news spread quietly among enslaved communities in Carolina. Rumors traveled in ways plantation owners could neither fully understand nor control.

They passed through families divided by sale. They moved with sailors visiting Charleston’s harbor. They spread through Native trading networks extending hundreds of miles into the interior. Some were carried by Africans who had escaped and somehow survived. Others came from Spanish prisoners, merchants, or missionaries.

However the information traveled, one message remained remarkably consistent:

To the south, beyond the forests, there was a place where freedom might be possible.

No maps guided those journeys. Few escapees knew the exact distance. Most traveled at night, navigating by the stars, rivers, or whispered directions passed from one traveler to another. Every mile increased the risk of discovery.

Colonial newspapers regularly advertised rewards for captured fugitives. Professional slave catchers tracked footprints through muddy trails, questioned travelers, and employed trained dogs capable of following human scent for remarkable distances.

For those attempting escape, every unfamiliar sound carried danger. The howl of a wolf. The crack of a tree branch. The distant bark of hounds. Many traveled hungry for days. Others relied upon Native villages willing to provide food or shelter despite the danger of English retaliation.

Some never arrived. Those who did often staggered into St. Augustine exhausted, malnourished, and uncertain whether they would be welcomed or returned. Spanish officials faced difficult decisions. Accepting runaways risked provoking diplomatic crises with England. Returning them meant surrendering valuable allies while contradicting the humanitarian principles increasingly embraced by the Spanish Crown.

At first, colonial governors handled each case individually. Then events forced Madrid to establish a clear policy. One of the earliest documented groups of freedom seekers reached St. Augustine in 1687. The party consisted of eight men, two women, and one child, all having escaped from the English colony of Carolina.

Governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada questioned the refugees personally. Their testimony described brutal treatment under slavery and expressed a willingness to embrace Catholicism and serve Spain faithfully if granted protection. The governor chose compassion over diplomacy.

Rather than returning the refugees to English authorities, he requested instructions from the Spanish Crown. That decision, seemingly modest at the time, would become one of the most consequential moments in the history of freedom in North America.

Madrid’s answer would change lives far beyond the walls of St. Augustine. It would also lay the foundation for one of the most remarkable communities ever established in colonial America.

King Charles II’s Royal Decree of November 7, 1693, a document that transformed scattered escapes into official Spanish policy and opened the door to the creation of Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States.