From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, millions of African people were kidnapped, chained, and taken across the Atlantic to the Americas, where nearly two million died during the voyage and enslaved black labor fueled economic growth in the United States under an ideology of white supremacy created to justify slavery. In the nineteenth century, the demand for enslaved labor expanded through the Domestic Slave Trade, as more than a million enslaved people were trafficked from the North to the South, families were torn apart, and black people endured brutal abuse. After the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, slavery evolved rather than ending, as violent resistance to racial equality, mass killings, the collapse of Reconstruction, disfranchisement, sharecropping, tenant farming, convict leasing, segregation, and racial integrity laws preserved white supremacy and black subordination. From 1877 to 1950, racial terror lynching became a primary tool of oppression, claiming thousands of African American lives, often without investigation or trial, with government tolerance, law enforcement sanction, and almost no criminal accountability. These lynchings were acts of terrorism tied directly to enslavement and the re-establishment of white supremacy after the Civil War, inflicting lasting political, economic, social, and psychological damage on African Americans and enduring national and institutional wounds that remain evident today.

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Montgomery, Alabama · USA