Clint Smith teaches you about one of the most famous writers, orators, and advocates of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born in slavery, escaped to the North, and became one of the most influential people of his time. Douglass wrote about the experience of slavery in a way that captured the attention of […]
The United States’ Constitution is not a very detailed document. It lays out the basic structure of government, and the details are filled in with legislation, and clarified and reinforced by court decisions. One of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions was the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson, which set the precedent that segregating […]
Despite all the hardship of being a Black person in Colonial America, some Black people were able to defy the harsh conditions and create art. Today we’re learning about a teenager who attained literacy and wrote poems that reached a large slice of the population and helped changed the ways that white Colonists thought about […]
Enslaved people resisted their condition in a range of different ways. Oftentimes those ways were small and personal. There were also times when that resistance took on larger, more dramatic forms, like with slave uprisings and rebellions. Today, we’ll learn about the Stono Rebellion, which was an uprising led by enslaved people in South Carolina […]
In this video, we’ll learn about the US Supreme Court decision in Scott vs Sanford, handed down in 1857. The case ultimately rejected the idea that Black people could be citizens of the United States, and this helped entrench the institution of slavery, denied a host of rights to a huge number of people (both […]
Slavery was inherently cruel and unjust, and it was cruel and unjust to different people in different ways. Today, Clint Smith teaches you about the experience of enslaved women, and how their experience of slavery was different than men. Women had a unique vantage point to understand slavery, and were particularly vulnerable to some terrible […]