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After the Revolution some 3,000 former slaves had been transported from New York to Nova Scotia, where they became known as Black Loyalists

Equiano was appointed to an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, at present-day Sierra Leone. The blacks from London were joined by more than 1,200 Black Loyalists who chose to leave Nova Scotia.

He was one of the leading members of the Sons of Africa, a small abolitionist group composed of free Africans in London

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797),[3] known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/),[4] was a prominent African in London, a freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade.

His last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766.

Equiano settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom.

in 1792 Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen and they had two daughters.

In Virginia, Equiano was bought in 1754 by Michael Pascal,

He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the West Indies.

He and a few other slaves were sent on to the British colony of Virginia.

Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England, and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War with France. Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain, so that the youth could attend school and learn to read and write.

At this time, Equiano converted to Christianity

Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.[1

King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds, the slave could buy his freedom.[14] King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his master's behalf

The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner, but the African found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into slavery.

By about 1767, Equiano had gained his freedom and went to England. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the British Royal Navy ship Racehorse, he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition to find a northern route to India.[15] On that voyage he worked with Dr. Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Vassa for a project on the Mosquito Coast in South America, where he was to use his African background and Igbo language to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar cane plantations. I

Equiano expanded his activities in London, learning the French horn and joining debating societies, including the London Corresponding Society. He continued his travels, visiting Philadelphia and New York in 1785 and 1786, respectively.

n the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement.

Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors.

As part of settling in Britain, Equiano/Vassa decided to marry and have a family. On 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local girl

The couple settled in the area and had two mixed-race daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857).

“The president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn.”

Could that cover asking the F.B.I. director to drop part of an investigation, and later firing him?

In theory, yes.

Did Trump have lawful authority to fire Comey?

example

ad filed legal complaints and related motions against a government agent who was investigating an illegal gambling operation

What would such a case entail, in theory?

prove defendants’ mental state

Samuel Buell,

But he said on Tuesday that subsequent revelations have made the evidence much more robust.

What impediments would there be to charging Mr. Trump?

to appoint a special counsel to handle it.

What about impeachment?

Bill Clinton in 1998 and Richard M. Nixon in 1974 — were accused of obstruction of justice.

Stuart Hall,

Prudence Crandall

Anne Braden

For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.

But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women

had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda

So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?

“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.

and Columbia University.

that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them

Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed

Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system

)

It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?

I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il

but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader

Fannie Lou Hamer

Huey P. Newton w

Mark Rudd

[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.

One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

E.D. Nixon,

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;

several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.

Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools

she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,

From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.

After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism

a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers

NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,

Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.

There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.

There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.

We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”

It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.

Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011

Black Lives Matter movement.

this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.

there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”

She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy

As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.

We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.