HUMANITY FILES

Collection

Slavery & Racial Violence

Cases documenting chattel slavery, the legal and social systems built to enforce racial hierarchy after abolition, and organized violence — including massacres, lynching and exclusionary law — directed at people because of their race or ethnicity.

1 file in this collection

FILE HF-0014

Atlantic Slave Trade

West and Central African coast; the Americas, Multiple (West/Central Africa; the Americas) · c. 1500s–1860s

From the early 16th century to the 1860s, European and American traders forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean into slavery in the Americas, in a trade organized around chartered national trading companies, plantation economies, and legal systems that treated enslaved people as property across generations. An estimated 1.8 million people died during the Middle Passage crossing alone.

Slavery & Racial Violence
high