Most people think slavery only happened in the South... but in 1851 nearly 500 Mormon settlers brought dozens of enslaved people to California, a state where slavery was already illegal, and never told them they were free.
๐ One of those enslaved people was a woman named Biddy Mason who walked 1,700 miles on foot from Mississippi, took her enslaver to court when she finally learned the truth, and died one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles. There is a monument in San Bernardino honoring the men who built this city... but there is nothing honoring the enslaved people who built it?โผ๏ธ๐ค
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) is an anti-lynching pamphlet written by journalist and activist lda B. Wells.
This was one of the first major investigations into lynching. She exposed how white newspapers lied about Black men and how many lynchings were actually about power, economics, and racial control not justice.