r/BlackHistory

In Nubian temples, several goddesses can, like their Egyptian counterparts, also be seen bearing avian features. As the consort of Amun-Re, one of the main gods of the Nubian pantheon, the goddess Mut is represented wearing a vulture headdress. It was Isis, the mother of Horus, however, who became the most prominent Kushite goddess, overshadowing Mut by the Meroitic period.

Like the Kushite goddess Amesemi (see below), both goddesses are frequently shown with one or two pairs of wings attached to their back and arms, thus emphasizing their protective role (fig. 1.8).

Protection was also provided by a vulture with outstretched wings, akin to the Egyptian goddess Nekhbet, or by a falcon, both birds being represented as hovering over the king and queen, ready to smite their enemies.

Gods, kings, queens, officials, and priests were further wrapped in feathered dresses, or in garments meticulously decorated with a falcon or vulture that shielded their flanks, shoulders, chest, or head, thus emphasizing the connection between the divine and the human (fig. 1.9).

Some rulers even wear a crown surmounted by a birds. By donning this regalia, they evoked the goddess Amesemi, the lion god Apedemak's consort, who is distinguished by a modius headdress topped with one or sometimes two falcons, whose function and origin remain unclear.

During the Meroitic period, the vulture could also be represented in temples as a scavenger or on small objects, such as signet rings, pendants, and bells, as plucking the eyes of fallen enemies (fig. 1.10). These motifs highlighted the prowess of kings and queens on the battlefield and made the vulture another powerful royal symbol alongside the lion.

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Source: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/Publications/ISACMP/isacmp4.pdf

On the warm, humid night of August 18, 1916, in the rural hamlet of Jonesville, just west of Gainesville, a dispute over livestock ignited one of the most brutal episodes of racial violence in Florida’s history. Before the weekend was over, a white mob would conduct a campaign of terror that left six documented African Americans dead, an entire community traumatized into silence, and a bloody stain on Alachua County that would take a century to confront publicly.

The events began in the pre-dawn hours of August 19. Constable S. G. Wynne, accompanied by Dr. L. G. Harris and G. H. Blount, rode out to the home of Boisey Long, a Black farmer in Jonesville. The lawmen intended to arrest or question Long regarding an alleged hog theft, a minor offense that in the Jim Crow era was routinely used to target and harass Black landowners and laborers.

Accounts of what transpired inside the cabin conflict sharply. Contemporary white press claimed that Long opened fire without warning when officers knocked on his door. Oral histories and later historical research suggest that the officers forced their way in with guns drawn and that Constable Wynne fired first, prompting Long to return fire in self-defense.

When the smoke cleared, Dr. Harris was wounded, Constable Wynne was mortally shot, and Long had fled into the surrounding woods. Wynne was rushed to a hospital in Jacksonville but died en route.

The death of a white lawman transformed a local law enforcement action into a deadly racial manhunt. Within hours, an armed white posse numbering between 200 and 300 men mobilized from across Alachua and Levy counties. Unable to immediately find Boisey Long, the mob turned its fury toward Long's family, friends, and neighbors, accusing them of aiding his escape.

James Dennis was hunted down in the woods near Jonesville during the search and shot to death on the spot. Five others were rounded up and locked inside the small frame Newberry jail: Gilbert Dennis, Mary Dennis, Stella Young, Andrew McHenry, and the Reverend Joshua Baskin. Mary Dennis was pregnant with twins at the time. None of the five held in the jail were ever charged with a crime, granted legal counsel, or brought before a judge.

In the early morning hours of August 19, 1916, the mob dragged the five prisoners out of the Newberry jail. They were taken to a clearing outside of town known as the local picnic grounds, a grove of live oaks later remembered grimly as Lynch Hammock or Hangman’s Island.

There, the mob hanged all five victims from a massive oak tree. When morning broke, the bodies were deliberately left hanging in public view as a spectacle of terror. White residents from surrounding towns drove out to view the scene, while local Black families hid in their homes, terrified that the mob would turn on them next.

While history officially documents these six victims, known collectively as the Newberry Six, local oral histories preserved by Black families suggest that additional unnamed Black residents were shot or killed in the surrounding woods during the chaos.

Boisey Long was eventually captured days later on August 23 near Chiefland. Brought back under heavy guard, he was given a brief trial in Gainesville by an all-white jury, convicted, and executed in the state electric chair in 1917.

In the wake of the massacre, an overwhelming conspiracy of silence settled over Alachua County. White perpetrators enforced an oath among themselves to never speak publicly of the killings to law enforcement or reporters, ensuring no member of the mob was ever indicted or prosecuted.

For Black families, speaking about the incident posed an existential threat to their lives and livelihoods. For nearly a century, the Newberry Lynchings were relegated to hushed whispers, private family grief, and deliberate omission from official town histories.

The wall of silence began to break through the dedicated work of community historians, descendants, and scholars, most notably the late Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn, a professor and filmmaker at the University of Florida. By collecting oral histories from descendants, Dr. Hilliard-Nunn helped piece together the names, human stories, and dignity of the victims.

In recent years, the community of Newberry and Alachua County has taken active steps to confront this chapter of its past. In 2018, a state historical marker was placed near the cemetery at Pleasant Plain United Methodist Church in Jonesville, where several of the victims are buried in historically unmarked or restored graves.

In 2021, partnering with the Equal Justice Initiative and the Alachua County Community Remembrance Project, soil was gathered from Lynch Hammock to be displayed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and a second marker was dedicated near the site of the hanging.

The history of Florida is often told through its conquests, boomtowns, coastlines, and space missions, but an honest account of the state must also hold space for August 19, 1916. The Newberry Six were not casualties of a random event; they were victims of a system of racial terror designed to deny basic human rights and legal protections to Black Floridians.

By naming Gilbert Dennis, Mary Dennis, Stella Young, Andrew McHenry, Rev. Joshua Baskin, and James Dennis, Florida refuses to allow mob violence and silence to have the final word.

Rest In Power

For most of her career, Gladys West worked in quiet concentration at a naval base in Dahlgren, Virginia.

Born in 1930 in rural Sutherland, she became one of the few Black women mathematicians employed by the U.S. Navy in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s she analyzed vast amounts of satellite data, programming early computers to calculate the precise shape of the Earth — a complex, irregular form known as the geoid.

Her models accounted for gravitational variations, tides, and other forces that distort the planet’s surface. The work fed directly into the development of the Global Positioning System. Without an accurate mathematical description of Earth’s shape, the satellite signals that now guide ships, aircraft, and everyday navigation could not deliver reliable positions.

West continued refining the calculations through the 1980s, publishing technical reports that improved the underlying geodesy still used today. For decades her contribution remained largely unknown outside specialist circles. Only later in life did she receive public recognition for the foundation she had helped build.

A system that billions of people now take for granted rests in part on the careful mathematics of a woman who spent years turning satellite observations into a usable model of the world. Gladys West made the map more precise, and then returned to the quiet work of numbers.

This law stipulated that all children of enslaved people born in Peruvian territory after the declaration of independence (July 28, 1821) would be considered free citizens.

It should be clarified that what José de San Martín implemented was not an immediate manumission, but rather a process of gradual abolition of slavery, a preferred approach in most Iberian American nations of the time. Similar measures had been enacted previously in Chile (1811) and in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (1813), as well as in Gran Colombia (officially known as the Republic of Colombia), which approved "freedom of birth" on July 21, 1821.

However, in practice, this law fell far short of granting absolute independence. To avoid disrupting the agrarian economic structure or antagonizing the landowners, the law established a legal system known as "patronage" or "child-rearing." Under this system, although children were technically born free, they were required to remain under the guardianship and servitude of their mothers' masters to "compensate for the costs of their upbringing." This regime extended until the age of 24 for boys and 20 for girls.

A key military context: Both the royalist and revolutionary forces offered freedom to slaves as an incentive to enlist. José de San Martín relied heavily on troops of Black descent—who formed a vital part of the liberating armies of the Andes and Peru—so this decree also sought to respond to social pressure and consolidate popular support for the independence cause.

Despite the limitations of the law and the fact that landowners considered it a temporary adjustment brought about by the war, the freedom of children born to enslaved mothers marked the beginning of the decline of the institution of slavery. Other complementary provisions followed, such as the decree of November 6, 1821, which granted freedom to slaves belonging to Spaniards who emigrated from the country.

The definitive and total abolition of slavery in Peru would take more than three decades to materialize. It finally occurred on December 3, 1854, through the celebrated decree promulgated by President Ramón Castilla in Huancayo, a process largely financed by the substantial revenues of the guano era, with which the State directly and financially compensated the former slave owners.

Image: “Negros chalas en el día del Corpus” by the Black Peruvian painter Pancho Fierro (ca. 1830), detail.

This genre watercolor, attributed to the renowned Lima painter Pancho Fierro, sharply and with documentary value portrays the militias, troupes, and festivities of Lima society at the dawn of the republic. In it, we see a Black Peruvian couple carrying the second design of the Peruvian flag created by the Marquis of Torre Tagle, highlighting the prominent role of the Black population in the iconography of the revolutionary cause.

In the 1960s, construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed housing and divided Black-majority neighborhoods in New York City. This, along with government and business disinvestment, set the stage for the rise of gangs in the city. Amidst the urban decay, block parties were a popular way for Black youth to find something to enjoy in the ghetto. On a sweltering Saturday night in August 1973, an otherwise ordinary end-of-summer party in the Bronx became the site of something extraordinary. The party was hosted by DJ Kool Herc who debuted a new technique he’d developed that extended the dance breaks in songs, allowing dancers to show off their skills longer and keep the crowd hyped. Since there was no singing during these breaks, Herc’s friend, Coke La Rock, would get on the mic and call out the names of the dancers, motivating them to show off their moves while he freestyled rhymes to keep the party going.

Two years later, when police shot and killed an unarmed Black man, his death inspired his friend Afrika Bambaataa to redirect his energies toward nonviolence. Bambaataa had just entered a UNICEF essay contest and won a trip to Nigeria, an experience that motivated him to create a community of positivity and Black empowerment in NYC. He began collaborating with other DJs and MCs to create an alternative to gang life with a group he called the Zulu Nation, which spread peace and unity through breakdancing competitions in the Bronx.

When singer Silvia Robinson went to one of these parties in 1979, she was inspired to recruit several MCs to record what became the first commercial rap song, “Rapper’s Delight.” The music of DJs and rappers became known as “hip-hop” as it rapidly spread the voices of urban Blacks across America, with the lyrics conveying the truth of life in the ghetto. Born in oppression, hip-hop became the sound of freedom. By 2017, hip-hop proclaimed its endurance by becoming America’s most popular music genre, and in 2023, fifty years after hip-hop’s birth, DJ Kool Herc was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Recommended reading: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang and D.J. Kool Herc

Hip-Hop Became the Sound of Freedom

The daughter of the slave Isabel de los Ríos, Ursula was raised in the home of Luisa Melgarejo, a well-known "alumbrada" (a member of the Convent's spiritual movement) connected to the inner circle of the future Saint Rose of Lima. This environment fostered her early religious inclination and led her to enter the Poor Clare monastery in 1617 as a servant. Years later, the community itself purchased her freedom so that she could take the habit of a lay sister.

A turning point in her life occurred around 1642, when she miraculously survived a fall into a deep well in the convent; an event considered miraculous and attributed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Following this event, Ursula intensified her penances and focused her devotional practice on interceding for the souls in Purgatory.

At the behest of her confessor, between 1650 and 1661 she wrote her Spiritual Diary, a mystical corpus of exceptional value that remained unpublished in the monastery archives for more than four centuries. In its pages, Ursula records visions and direct dialogues with Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the souls in Purgatory, whom she aided through prayers and mortifications. Her mystical work is also notable for its unprecedented social scope: in her visions, Purgatory and Heaven were not spaces exclusive to the Spanish elite, but places where priests, nuns, Black people, and Indians shared the same divine destiny.

Throughout her life, she was credited with various extraordinary gifts, such as prophetic visions, discernment of spirits, and the ability to confirm the liberation and ascension to heaven of the souls for whom she prayed. By her death in 1666, her fame for holiness and as an exemplary nun had spread throughout the city.

Her likeness was captured in a posthumous, full-length portrait by José de la Cruz, a little-known painter and likely of African descent like herself. Commissioned by the monastery in recognition of her merits, the canvas follows the conventions of Lima portraiture by depicting her at a desk with a book. This iconography explicitly highlights her dual status as a literate woman and mystical writer, a truly unique case in the context of viceregal Peru.

Image: Portrait of Sister Ursula de Jesús by José de la Cruz, 18th century. Oil on canvas.

On January 8, 1867, African American men obtained the right to vote in Washington, D.C. after Congress overrode the veto of President Andrew Johnson. Because the District of Columbia was not a state, the right to vote was limited to local elections and not in federal elections. As the rapidly growing Black population exercised their power of self-rule in the District, Congress responded in 1874 by replacing D.C.’s elected government with three presidentially appointed commissioners. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being…[to] burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.” A newspaper wrote in 1878 that D.C.’s “present form of alien government is about as bad as to be devised. But a system which gives the control of the district to ignorant and depraved Negroes is still worse.”

In 1961, Congress gave the District three electoral votes, enabling residents to vote for president while still not having representation in Congress. Then, in 1973, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Home Rule Act returning local control to Washington residents 99 years after removing democracy from the District. Although the Act allowed the city council to pass criminal laws, it required continued reliance on federal prosecutors to enforce them with no control over who served as prosecutor.

In 2019, when the District decided to reduce sentencing ranges for felons found in possession of a firearm, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced it would begin to prosecute such cases in federal court where sentencing ranges were twice as long. Analysis shows that prosecutors selectively enforced this policy only in predominantly Black neighborhoods resulting in 97 percent of those charged being Black.

Recommended reading: Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove

Congress Prevents Democracy in America’s Capital