The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa who had been sold by West African slave traders mainly to Portuguese, British, Spanish, Dutch, and French slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade.
Juneteenth is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Its name is a portmanteau of the words "June" and "nineteenth", as it is celebrated on the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when as the American Civil War was ending, Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. Originating in Galveston, Juneteenth has since been observed annually in various parts of the United States, often broadly celebrating African-American culture.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery as it existed in the European colonies which eventually became part of the United States. In these colonies, slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were victims of enslavement by European colonizers during the era.
An African American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the black populations of Africa. African American-related topics include:
Emancipation Day is observed in many former European colonies in the Caribbean and areas of the United States on various dates to commemorate the emancipation of slaves of African descent.
M. K. Asante is an American author, filmmaker, recording artist, and professor. He is the author of the 2013 best-selling memoir Buck: A Memoir.
Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli journalist, documentary filmmaker and New York Times best-selling author.
500 Years Later is a 2005 independent documentary film directed by Owen 'Alik Shahadah and written by M. K. Asante, Jr. It has won five international film festival awards in the category of Best Documentary, including the UNESCO "Breaking the Chains" award. It has won other awards including Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Best Documentary at the Bridgetown Film Festival in Barbados, Best Film at the International Black Cinema Film Festival in Berlin, and Best International Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival in New York.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. The festival takes place every January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Stolen is a 2009 Australian documentary film that uncovers slavery in the Sahrawi refugee camps controlled by the Polisario Front located in Algeria and in the disputed territory of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco, written and directed by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw. It had its world premiere at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, where a controversy started after one of the participants in the documentary, Fetim, a black Sahrawi, was flown to Australia by the Polisario Liberation Front to say she wasn't a slave. The POLISARIO, avowing that it doesn’t condone slavery and needing to safeguard its image on the world stage to support its independence fight, began an international campaign against the film. It put out its own video denouncing Stolen, in which several people who Ayala and Fallshaw interviewed say they were coerced or paid by the Australian duo. On May the 2nd 2007, while filming in the refugee camps Ayala and Fallshaw were detained by the Polisario Front and Minurso and the Australian ministry of foreign affairs negotiated their release. "The Polisario Front officials criticised the interest the two journalists took in black members of the Sahrawi population, Reporters Without Borders has learned. Ayala told the press freedom organisation that she saw cases of enslavement. "The fact that they are fighting for their independence does not mean that Polisario’s leaders can allow themselves to commit such human rights violations", she said. "It is our duty as journalists to denounce such practices. We originally went there to work on the problem of separated families. But during our stay, we witnessed scenes of slavery".
Ric Esther Bienstock is a Canadian documentary filmmaker best known for her investigative documentaries. She was born in Montreal, Quebec and studied at Vanier College and McGill University. She has produced and directed an eclectic array of films from investigative social issue documentaries like Sex Slaves, an investigation into the trafficking of women from former Soviet Bloc Countries into the global sex trade and Ebola: Inside an Outbreak which took viewers to ground zero of the Ebola outbreak in Zaire - to lighter fare such as Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour.
12 Years a Slave is a 2013 biographical drama film directed by Steve McQueen from a screenplay by John Ridley, based on the 1853 slave memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, an African American man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two conmen in 1841 and sold into slavery. He was put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released. The first scholarly edition of David Wilson's version of Northup's story was co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon.
Joe Walker is a British film editor working in Los Angeles. In 2022, he won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on Dune, having been nominated twice before for 12 Years a Slave and Arrival. For the American Cinema Editors Award for Best Edited Feature Film – Dramatic he has received a string of five nominations over eight years and in 2016 he won, for Arrival. He took the European Film Award for Best Editor for Shame in 2012 and Satellite Award for Best Editing for Sicario in 2016.
The Capri Hollywood International Film Festival is an annual international film festival held every late December or early January in Capri, Italy. Established in 1995, the competition section is open to international films, animation, documentaries and fiction.
The first Africans in Virginia were a group of "twenty and odd" captive persons originally from modern-day Angola who landed at Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia in late August 1619. Their arrival is seen as a beginning of the history of slavery in Virginia and British colonies in North America, although they were not in chattel slavery as it would develop in the United States, but were sold as indentured servants and had mostly worked off their indentures and were free by 1630. These colonies would go on to secede and become the United States in 1776. The landing of these captive Africans is also seen as a starting point for African-American history, given that they were the first such group in mainland British America.
The White Lion was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque which brought the first Africans to the English colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower in New England. Though the African captives were sold as indentured servants, the event is regarded as the start of African slavery in the colonial history of the United States.
The history of slavery in Colorado began centuries before Colorado achieved statehood when Spanish colonists of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (1598–1848) enslaved Native Americans, called Genízaros. Southern Colorado was part of the Spanish territory until 1848. Comanche and Utes raided villages of other indigenous people and enslaved them.
From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, various states of the United States of America allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were their descendants. The institution of chattel slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish colonization, British colonization, French colonization, and Dutch colonization.
Descendant is a 2022 American historical documentary film directed by Margaret Brown, chronicling the story behind Africatown in Alabama, and the descendants of the last known enslaved Africans brought to the United States aboard the Clotilda. The film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up for wider distribution by Higher Ground Productions and Netflix. It received a theatrical release on October 21, 2022 and was available to stream on Netflix that day as well.
