How Indigenous Slavery Persisted, Fueled American Markets, and Ensnared a U.S. Citizen in 1911 Herbert Williams, an American citizen from Indiana, reported in 1911 to have been held as a slave in Yucatán. Introduction: Slavery After It Was Supposed to Be Over By the early twentieth century, slavery was officially illegal across the Americas. Mexico abolished it in 1829. Britain outlawed it in 1833. The United States ended chattel slavery in 1865. And yet, American newspapers continued to...

How the National Urban League Became a Broker of Identity and Why Our Communities Must Stop Fighting Each Other For decades, some of the most intense conflicts among Black, Indigenous, and Freedmen-descended communities in the United States have been framed as internal disputes : Who is “really” Indigenous? Who qualifies as Black? Who deserves recognition, resources, or reparative justice? But what if these conflicts are not organic at all? What if the same institutional actor has repeatedly...

Every December, Kwanzaa returns to Black households across America and with it, a familiar argument. Not about the candles. Not about the principles. But about one man’s name . That debate misses the point. Kwanzaa was never meant to stand or fall on a single individual. Insisting that it does is one of the most un-African ways  to understand it. To grasp Kwanzaa correctly, we must restore Makinya Sibeko-Kouaté  to her rightful place, confront the limits of personality-centered history, and...