Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Slavery in America. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

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Bacon's Rebellion: In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, an English aristocrat who had immigrated to Virginia, led an armed rebellion against the unresponsive government in Virginia, achieving heroic status. Bacon led an army of 500 men from the ranks of backcountry planters, farmers, formerly indentured servants, and even freed blacks to attack Indians who had raided their plantations and farms. The government at Jamestown considered the army a rabble mob and declared Bacon a traitor. Bacon then marched on the colonial seat of government in Jamestown, burning it to the ground and forcing the Governor to flee across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore. Before a British naval squadron arrived, Bacon came down with a serious attack of dysentery and died. British soldiers restored order in the colony and the rebellion ended with little change in the prevailing political system. Bacon's appeal to enslaved blacks to join his cause struck fear into the hearts of tidewater planters. His actions looked to them as a biracial alliance of the lower classes against the propertied elite. To continue to use white indentured servants who could obtain guns as free men and women appeared to threaten a social order that privileged the upper-class elite. Over the next 25 years, planters switched almost completely to enslaved Africans in hopes of uniting all whites into a race-based alliance between the wealthy planters and poorer whites. Historians view Bacon's Rebellion as a major turning point in the history of slavery in that white southerners thereafter defined freedom and equality in terms of race rather than class. To be free and white was the promise of American equality, and all whites thereafter shared a common bond in their whiteness that superseded any class differences.

Bahamas: The Bahamas are a chain of dozens of islands located about 50 miles off the east coast of Florida, extending over 760 miles from North to South. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the New World on one of the islands of the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador. During the Spanish colonial period, slave raiders and disease carried off the entire native Arawak population of the islands. The English colonized the uninhabited islands beginning with Eleuthera in 1646 and New Providence in 1656. The Spanish and French competed with the English for control of the islands. Piracy thrived until Woodes Rogers became royal governor in 1718. He and his troops executed eight pirates and forced the surrender of 1,000 others. Although briefly captured by the U.S. during the American Revolution, the Bahamas remained a British colony and provided sanctuary to fleeing Loyalists. The United Kingdom Emancipation Act took force on August 1, 1834, thereby ending slavery in the Bahamas. Fugitive Black Seminole and slaves of U.S. Florida braved the perils of the Atlantic for the promise of a free life in the Bahamas.

Baker, Ella Jo: (1903-1986) After graduating as valedictorian from Shaw University in 1927, Ella Baker moved to New York City and worked as a newspaper reporter during the Harlem Renaissance. But she was soon drawn to community activism and helped initiate the Young Negroes Cooperate League which aimed to develop black economic power through collective planning during the depths of the Great Depression. In 1940 she became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as its field secretary and branch director organizing community groups throughout the South until 1946. That year she returned to New York City and resigned from her NAACP staff position but remained active as a volunteer, spearheading a movement to desegregate New York City public schools. In 1956, Baker along with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson formed In Friendship, a fund-raising organization supporting southern civil rights organizations stirred by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Baker was instrumental in organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black ministers in 1957 but disagreed with their concept of a strong central leadership. Convinced change must begin at the grassroots level to empower many, not the few, Baker mentored the consolidation of student activist groups into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During the early 1960s SNCC led the sit-in movement, Freedom Rides, and in 1964 launched a campaign in Mississippi called Freedom Summer designed to attract national attention to the innumerable barriers blacks faced in voter registration. Returning to New York City in 1964, Baker continued zealously working for civil rights until she died there on her birthday in 1986.

Baldwin, James: (1924-1987) Author and a staunch advocate of civil rights, who was born and raised in the Harlem slums of New York City. Baldwin's most important novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953), his non-fictional The Fire Next Time (1963), and his play Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) established him as the literary successor of Richard Wright and America's most important black writer in the 1950s and 1960s. Baldwin's work explored the idea that African Americans are victimized by the "guilty imaginations of whites who invest him (blacks) with their hate and longings." In his famous 1949 essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," Baldwin challenged Richard Wright's literary writings as a rejection of life and the denial of the beauty and power in every human being. The two men became personal and literary opponents with Wright accusing Baldwin of betraying all African-American writers in favor of personal and self-centered musings.

Baldwin, Roger Nash: (1884-1981) Born in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1884, Baldwin graduated from Harvard University in 1905, taught Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis (1906-09), and worked as the chief probation officer of that city's juvenile court before serving prison time as a conscientious objector to compulsory military service during World War One. He helped found the American Civil Liberties in Union in 1920and was its director from 1920 to 50, and then its national chairperson for a five-year term (1950-55). Remembered as a giant among the leading civil rights champions, he died on August 26, 1981.

Bambara, Toni Cade: (1939-1995) Born Miltona Mirkin Cade, Toni Bambara spent her earliest years absorbing the culture of Harlem. The diverse local population sprinkled with speakers and musicians as well as family, echo throughout her rich prose. Bambara attended Queens College and graduated in 1959 as a theatre/English major and shortly thereafter published her first short story "Sweet Town." Between 1962 and 1965, Bambara taught at City College of New York and involved herself in numerous community groups. She published an anthology of African-American women writers, entitled The Black Woman, answering a growing need for published writing for black women by black women. She was an ardent feminist who refused to separate the battle for civil rights from the struggle of women for equal rights. By 1971, Bambara was teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey when she edited a second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks. Following the anthologies, Bambara published a collection of her own short stories Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977). She also produced a documentary film on the 1985 bombing of the black community MOVE in Philadelphia, The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices(1995). In all of her work, Bambara sought to link the political with the artistic and the metaphysical. She died in 1995 from colon cancer in Philadelphia, leaving behind a distinctive image of the contemporary black experience.

Barbados: The eastern-most island of the West Indies was first visited by the Portuguese and occupied by the British in the early 1600s. It became a separate colony in 1885 and fully independent in 1966. During the era of slavery, Barbados had one of the highest concentrations of enslaved persons per square mile in the Americas. Settled by the British in 1627, the island quickly became a land characterized by sweeping sugar plantations. At first, white indentured servants, many of whom were kidnapped or simply exiled to the islands, worked the plantations. This practice of sending undesirable whites to the island was known in England as being "barbdosed." In the 1630s, over 7,000 Irish were forcibly moved to the island. It is estimated that nearly 400,000 enslaved Africans, principally from Ghana and Nigeria were transported to Barbados between 1627 and 1807. Unlike most of the other islands of the West Indies, a sizable number of Europeans lived on the island, working as planters and overseers--perhaps 20 percent. While most whites in the island were English, some were Sephardic Jews who had been driven out of Brazil, bringing their knowledge of sugar cultivation to Barbados. This mixture of Western Europeans and West Africans produced a Creole culture that was also unique--especially in language'to Barbados. Unlike many of the other West Indian islands, a larger percentage of Barbados blacks were born on the islands and tended to live longer than enslaved Africans elsewhere. The ratio of women to men was also more evenly balanced than in the other islands where men far outnumbered females. Between 1680 and 1780, Barbados planters had kinship relations with whites in the Carolinas, and many of the enslaved people in that colony had been brought to the mainland by their emigrating Barbados masters.

Barber, Jesse Max: (1878-1949) A journalist and dentist from Atlanta who, with Austin Jenkins, established the Voice of the Negro, the foremost black journal of its time. Barber was an unrelenting opponent of racial injustice and an outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington.

Barber-Scotia College: A teaching institution founded in North Carolina as Scotia Seminary by the Presbyterian Church in 1867; its objective was to train black women to become teachers and social workers. In 1916, the school changed its name to Scotia College and later merged with Barber Memorial College to become Barber-Scotia in 1932. Thirteen years later, the institution was granting bachelor's degrees, and men were admitted in 1954. Noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune ranks as one of Barber-Scotia's most famous alumni. She founded Bethune-Cookman College in 1904 and the National Council of Negro Women, and she served as director of the Negro Affairs Division of the National Youth Administration during the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. Barber-Scotia remains affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and currently has approximately 480 students taking classes in 13 different fields.

Barrett, Janie Porter: (1865-1948) An African-American social reformer and educator who, after teaching at the Hampton Institute, founded the Locust Street Social Settlement, a home for local women, children, and elderly in need. She later founded the Virginia Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls in Peak, a school for young African-American women in trouble with the law.

Bates, Daisy Lee Gaston: (1914-1999) In the fall of 1957, Little Rock's Central High School mesmerized the nation when nine black students tested the resolve of the federal government to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. As president of the state NAACP, Daisy Bates coordinated the school integration effort in Little Rock. Her home served as the meeting place for the students who became known as the Little Rock Nine. Governor Orval Fabus (who declared that blood would run in the streets of Little Rock should black students attempt to integrate Central High), the Arkansas National Guard, and a threatening, jeering crowd successfully repelled the nine students on their initial attempts to enter the school. The following day, Bates telegrammed President Dwight Eisenhower for help. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school and maintain order. For weeks Bates and the students endured unrelenting racial taunts, slurs, and threats, but rocks hurled through Bates' windows, a cross burned on the roof of her home, and being burned in effigy.

Bates had never been a stranger to racial violence. As a child in Huttig, Arkansas, she had been raised by Orlee and Susie Smith after her mother was raped and murdered by three white men and her father fled the town. As a young woman, Daisy Bates (with her husband L.C.) co-edited and published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper devoted to civil rights and exposing injustices. After the Central High School episode, advertising revenue for the paper dried up, forcing its closure and nearly ruining the Bateses financially. Bates moved to New York City and spent the next two years writing The Long Shadow of Little Rock, chronicling the Central High School crisis. The book was published with a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962. In the mid-1960s Daisy Bates moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee and served in President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty crusade. She returned to Arkansas in 1968 and worked on the local level to improve conditions in black communities. In 1984 the State Press circulated again but Bates sold it in 1987. She died in Little Rock at the age of 84 in 1999. In the fall of 1957, Little Rock's Central High School mesmerized the nation when nine black students tested the resolve of the federal government to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. As president of the state NAACP, Daisy Bates coordinated the school integration effort in Little Rock. Her home served as the meeting place for the students who became known as the Little Rock Nine. Governor Orval Fabus (who declared that blood would run in the streets of Little Rock should black students attempt to integrate Central High), the Arkansas National Guard, and a threatening, jeering crowd successfully repelled the nine students on their initial attempts to enter the school. The following day, Bates telegrammed President Dwight Eisenhower for help. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school and maintain order. For weeks Bates and the students endured unrelenting racial taunts, slurs, and threats, but rocks hurled through Bates' windows, a cross burned on the roof of her home, and being burned in effigy.

Bates had never been a stranger to racial violence. As a child in Huttig, Arkansas, she had been raised by Orlee and Susie Smith after her mother was raped and murdered by three white men and her father fled the town. As a young woman, Daisy Bates (with her husband L.C.) co-edited and published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper devoted to civil rights and exposing injustices. After the Central High School episode, advertising revenue for the paper dried up, forcing its closure and nearly ruining the Bateses financially. Bates moved to New York City and spent the next two years writing The Long Shadow of Little Rock, chronicling the Central High School crisis. The book was published with a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962. In the mid-1960s Daisy Bates moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee and served in President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty crusade. She returned to Arkansas in 1968 and worked on the local level to improve conditions in black communities. In 1984 the State Press circulated again but Bates sold it in 1987. She died in Little Rock at the age of 84 in 1999.

Battle of Horseshoe Bend: The Battle of Horseshoe Bend (or Tohopeka) occurred on the Tallapoosa River on March 27, 1814. Major General Andrew Jackson led 2,600 west Tennessee militia, 500 Cherokee, and 100 Lower Creek against 1,000 Red Stick Upper Creek warriors. The Red Stick had placed a barricade in front of the village of Tohopeka, where 500 women and children remained. A horseshoe-shaped bend in the Tallapoosa River protected the remaining three sides of Tohopeka. When Jackson's bombardment of the barricade failed to break through, Indian allies swam into Tohopeka, stole canoes, and transported part of Jackson's force behind the barricade. Jackson attacked the distracted Red Sticks, and over 800 warriors died, killed between the two forces or drowned in the river. The battle forever destroyed the military power of the Creek Confederation, the strongest of the Five Civilized Tribes. Jackson imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson on the Creek on August 9, 1814, requiring them to give up half of their lands and 20 million acres in southern Georgia and central Alabama.

Bechet, Sidney Joseph: (1897-1959) A New Orleans Creole of color and one of the most influential New Orleans jazz musicians of his time. His unique style as a saxophonist and commanding spirit was instrumental in both transforming jazz form ensemble music to a soloist's art and spreading jazz through America and the world.

Benedict College, Columbia: A school for the newly emancipated people, founded in 1870 as the Benedict Institute by the American Baptist Home Mission Society and named for Bathsheba A. Benedict of Rhode Island, who provided $13,000 for its establishment. Established to train teachers and ministers, the school expanded its curriculum in 1894, chartered it as a liberal arts college, and changed its name to Benedict College. Not until 1930, however, did Benedict have an African-American president. The college continues to be affiliated with the South Carolina Baptist Education and Missionary Convention and the American Baptist Churches, USA. The school offers 25 major areas of study to its approximately 3,000 students.

Bennett College, Greensboro: A school that, at its inception in 1873, was in the basement of Warnersville Methodist Episcopal Church and set out to provide teacher training to African-American men and women. A year later, it came under the aegis of the Southern Education Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Seeking funding for building expansion, the school received $10,000 from a New York businessman, Lyman Bennett, and was renamed Bennett Seminary. By 1879, the school's expanded curriculum offered college, normal, and English courses. It was reorganized into a women's college in 1926 by the Women's Home Missionary Society and named Bennett College for Women.

Bennett, Gwendolyn: (1902-1981) Although Gwendolyn Bennett's early peripatetic life began in the Southwest, as a painter and writer she is most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. Landing in Brooklyn as a teenager, Bennett graduated from Girls' High School in 1921. After attending Columbia University in Fine Arts, she transferred to the Pratt Institute and graduated in 1924. As both a painter and a writer/poet, Bennett's work began appearing in numerous publications such as NAACP's The Crisis and the Urban League's Opportunity during the early to mid-1920s. By 1931, 22 of her poems had been published. In 1924, Bennett left New York to teach art at Howard University but she returned in 1926 when she joined with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent to form a literary magazine entitled Fire!! In the early 1930s she refocused her energies on creating an African-American arts alliance called the Harlem Artists Guild and worked tirelessly to develop creative talents in other young black artists. Bennett died in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1981.

Bethune, Mary McLeod: (1875-1955) Founder of a vocational school for girls in Daytona, Florida, and activist in the Democratic Party, she was born in South Carolina and educated at the Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. In 1923, Bethune's school merged with a facility for black boys under the auspices of the Methodist Church and was renamed Bethune-Cookman College. In the 1920s, she accepted the presidency of the National Association of Colored Women and founded the National Council of Negro Women. Because Bethune was a party activist and personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of the National Youth Association--making her the first African-American woman to hold a high position in government. For teacher-reviewed external web sites on Bethune, click here.

Bethune-Cookman College: A school that was founded by noted black educator Mary McLeod Bethune in 1904 as the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls and that began when five girls paid 50 cents a week to attend school. Nine years later, Bethune merged her school with the Cookman Institute, began admitting males, and expanded the curriculum to include high school studies. After establishing an affiliation with the United Methodist Church, the school grew into Bethune-Cookman Junior College in 1931. Ten years later, the Florida legislature approved it to become a four-year liberal arts college, principally to educate teachers. Today, the school enrolls over 2,500 students and offers BA and BS degrees in over 35 different fields.

Birth of a Nation, The: [1915] A silent film released in 1915 by D. W. Griffith and widely acclaimed both as a cinematic masterpiece and an historical monstrosity of extreme racism. It depicted the domination of the South during the Reconstruction years by an immoral and ignorant black population unfit for freedom. The Ku Klux Klan saved the day by rescuing white women from the debauchery of crazed black troops. The film won wide audience approval, grossing $18 million ($275 million in 2001 dollars). President Wilson praised the film, while the NAACP condemned it. In some communities, white filmgoers attacked blacks after seeing the film.

Black Belt: As defined by historical geographers, a region of rich soil extending across central Alabama into Mississippi and Tennessee and dominated by plantation agriculture from the 1820s into the modern era. Historians and social scientists use the term, however, to mean any region of the South characterized by plantation culture and populated by enslaved blacks in the antebellum period and sharecroppers in the postbellum era. This would include much of the Mississippi and Louisiana delta regions as well as similar areas in Georgia and the Carolinas. Historically, it is an impoverished area rich in African-American culture--home to authentic folk music, deeply embedded religious practices, and plantation-created values.

Black Cabinet: (1934-1945) A group of African Americans who received appointments to various government agencies and served as informal advisors to President Franklin Roosevelt, who began appointing blacks to these positions in response to the growing importance of the African-American vote in the 1930s. Of the 45 blacks receiving appointments, those who advised FDR as members of this informal "black cabinet" included Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, who served in the Attorney General's office; William H. Hastie, a civil rights attorney, in the Department of the Interior; Robert C. Weaver, an economist, also in the Interior Department; Lawrence A. Oxley, a social worker, in the Department of Labor; Edgar Brown, president of the United Government Employees, in the Civilian Conservation Corps; and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College, who was named head of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration.

Black Codes: (1865-1867) Laws and proclamations restricting the civil rights of the formerly enslaved African Americans that were passed in most southern states at the end of the Civil War. The harshest provisions used vagrancy and apprenticeship laws to bind the freedmen to the land, limiting their personal freedom and relegating them to a status similar to serfs in Eastern Europe. The U. S. Congress reacted to these laws by imposing military rule over the South and passing civil rights legislation. The Codes also energized the drive for the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U. S. Constitution, extending citizenship to all African Americans and suffrage to black males.

Black Nationalism: Black Nationalism is a positive affirmation of the cultural, political, social, and economic identity of people of African descent. Historically, it is the outgrowth of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s, and to a lesser degree Noble Drew Ali's Chicago-based Moorish American Science Temple, founded in 1925. Both organizations gave their followers a sense of unity and identity that had been lacking among African Americans since Reconstruction. Both organizations lost their leaders in the late 1920s: Marcus Garvey was deported to his native Jamaica in 1927; Noble Drew Ali died in Chicago under mysterious circumstances in 1929. While these organizations proved temporary, the movement for African-American cultural unity and identity with Africa, Black Nationalism, has remained a vibrant force in the United States, including millions of members in various organizations such as the Black Muslims. The failure of the Civil Rights movement to obtain meaningful economic equity for most black Americans led many blacks to took to Black Nationalism as a means of confronting the dominant white culture of America. Among its most prominent leaders was the brilliant activist Malcolm X.

Bluefield State College: Originally, a black teacher's college and a school for miners' children in West Virginia. It was established as Bluefield Colored Institute through an act passed by the State Legislature on February 21, 1895, in response to the swelling population of black miners attracted to West Virginia's coalfields following the Civil War and the need to educate their children in the segregated school system of the time. A week after it was passed, the act became law even without Governor William Alexander MacCorkle's approval. Benefiting from Morrill Land Grant money, the school bought four acres in Bluefield making it accessible to the majority of the State's black residents. By 1909, the institute had adopted a formal normal school curriculum. During the first half of the twentieth century, Bluefield attracted a number of distinguished black scholars and artists, among them John Hope Franklin, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington. The 1954, Federal law declaring segregated schools illegal forcing Bluefield State to integrate brought three white students to the student body of 354. Today, black students comprise only ten percent of the student body.

Blues: Songs, most of which were tragic and forlorn, composed and sung by impoverished black sharecroppers in the rural plantations of the Mississippi Delta about their life experiences. They sang about everything from trains to mules and fast women to greedy merchants. Guitars, harmonica, and washboards were the preferred instruments that accompanied the primitive and "boogie" songs in country nightclubs known as "juke joints." W. C. Handy, the father of the blues, was born in Alabama in 1873. By 1900, his bands dominated the playing halls of Memphis and the small towns of the lower-Mississippi River Valley. He composed such hits as "St. Louis Blues." Gertrude Pridgett, or Ma Rainey, who started out in minstrel shows, was known as the "Mother of the Blues" by the 1920s. Her songs told of lost love, betrayal, perseverance, and lives overwhelmed by cheap whiskey, gambling, violence, and poverty.

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