Way Black When

About Way Black When

WayBlackWhen uncovers the Black history they left out, buried, distorted, or tried to erase. This channel explores untold Black history, forgotten Black inventors, erased wealth, hidden success stories, Black excellence, African American history, Black W wayblackwhen.substack.com (https://wayblackwhen.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Jo Constant

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Aug 2026

Latest episode

25 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

6 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   25 Aug 2026

   The Women Generals Haiti's History Erased

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wayblackwhen.substack.com (https://wayblackwhen.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) The women generals Haiti’s history forgot didn’t just survive the revolution, they led parts of it. Sanite Belair rode into battle beside her husband Charles Belair and commanded her own troops, only to be executed by firing squad in 1802 after refusing to watch him die alone. Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere held the line at the brutal siege of Crête-à-Pierro…

2. 

   15 Aug 2026

   Betty Boop’s Black Voice. Stolen By A White Woman.

   Helen Kane watched a Black child perform a scat style at a Harlem club in 1928. Months later she recorded it under her own name and became famous as the Boop-Oop-A-Doop Girl. Fleischer Studios built Betty Boop around Kane, not around the child, and the cartoon went on to earn millions. When Kane sued Fleischer in 1934 claiming they'd stolen from her, the defense used the same child's stage act as evidence, without paying her, without putting her on the stand, and without her even being in the courtroom. This is the documented, sourced story of Baby Esther Jones, the theft that built two careers on top of hers, and the disappearance nobody has ever explained. Way Black When is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe (https://wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   13 Aug 2026

   The Church Branded Its Slaves With Its Own Name

   What would the world be without Black people? Well, the Church of England would have had to find somebody else’s chest to burn its name into. Branding a person takes more than an iron. It takes a fire, and somebody to keep it lit. It takes hands, more than one pair, because a body does not hold still for that. And it takes a decision made in advance, in a room, by people who are calm, because somebody has to choose what the mark will say. They chose a whole word. Not initials. Not a symbol. A word, burned across the chest above the heart, deep enough to scar, so that if the person wearing it ever ran, the owner could prove the body was his. The word was SOCIETY. The owner was a missionary organisation. Its president was the Archbishop of Canterbury. They came to save souls. They showed up with a branding iron. If nobody taught you that, do not feel bad. That was on purpose. Subscribe and Share WayBlackWhen for more buried stories they tried to erase. The men who owned him ran the mission to save him The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was chartered in 1701. Its entire reason for existing was to carry Christianity across the empire. Archbishops of Canterbury led it. Bishops of London sat on it. Archbishops of York were involved in it. In 1710 it inherited two sugar estates in Barbados, roughly 763 acres in the parish of St John, and three hundred and fifteen enslaved Africans listed the way you list livestock and cane presses. It did not sell them. It did not free them. It ran the estate. It appointed the attorneys. It read the accounts. It kept the books. For one hundred and twenty six years. Every Sunday for a century and a quarter, the same institution stood in pulpits across England and preached that every soul is equal in the sight of God, while several hundred of those equal souls were cutting its cane in Barbados with its name burned into their skin. The baptism vow made you swear off your own freedom This is the part that should stop you. The Society did eventually offer baptism. It came with a condition, written into the ceremony itself. Before receiving the sacrament, an enslaved convert had to stand up and declare that they did “not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the duty and Obedience you owe to your Master.” Read it again slowly. To be allowed near God, you first had to say out loud, in front of the people who owned you, that you were not trying to get free. They put a disclaimer on grace. Think about what that requires. Somebody drafted that sentence. Somebody approved it. Somebody read it aloud at the front of a room, looked into the face of a person they had branded, and waited for them to repeat it back. Sanctuary is the oldest promise the Church makes. On this estate it was the one thing that was never available. Sixteen years. Not one soul saved. Here is where the whole justification collapses. The argument for all of it, the argument every slaveholding Christian in the Atlantic world leaned on, was that bondage was the price of salvation. Bring them over, work them, but save them. That was the trade. The Society did not honour its side of it. By 1726, sixteen years into ownership, not one enslaved person on the Codrington estates had been baptized. Sixteen years. Hundreds of people. Zero. The organisation whose only stated purpose on earth was saving souls owned several hundred souls outright and did not get around to a single one of them for sixteen years. They were not even doing the thing they said the slavery was for. The bishop who wrote the loophole also read out the profits In 1711, one year into ownership, William Fleetwood, Bishop of St Asaph, delivered the Society’s annual sermon and settled the legal question before anybody could raise it. His position, in his own words, was that if enslaved people “could be sold before they were baptized, the Laws of Christ would not deprive the owners of that property after baptism.” Baptism was not a door. It was a lock with a cross on it. And in the same sermon, from the same pulpit, in the same breath, he reported the yield. The Codrington estates were producing “upwards of 2000£ per Annum, clear of all Charges.” Clear of all charges. The charges were people. Christopher Codrington, who left the estates to the Society when he died in 1710, had been specific about the arrangement. The plantations were to keep “three hundred negros at least kept always thereon” so the profits could fund scholars living under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Vows of poverty. Funded by sugar. Somebody had to cut the sugar. The same will sent £10,000 and twelve thousand books to All Souls College, Oxford, to build a library. Oxford got the books. The Church got the bodies. Both bequests came out of the same fortune, and only one of them was expected to bleed for it. Four in ten dead within three years Barbados sugar did not employ people. It went through them. Of every ten enslaved people the Society purchased in 1740, four were dead inside three years. A contemporary observation in 1746 put it at roughly one third of all Africans arriving in the West Indies dead within three years of landing. So the Society bought more. USPG, the organisation the SPG became, now estimates that between 190 and 440 people worked the estate at any one time, and that somewhere between 600 and 1,200 human beings lived and died there under Church ownership. Sit with the distance between those two numbers. To keep a few hundred people standing in a field, the Church buried more than a thousand. That is not a tragedy that happened to the operation. That is the operation. And the whip stayed. By USPG’s own account, the whip “in the field” was not abolished on the estate until September 1829. One hundred and nineteen years in. Nineteen years into the century of the abolitionists, on land owned by the Church of England, a man could still be beaten in a field for working too slowly. They had a word for it. They wrote it down. They filed it. A letter dated 25 April 1741, now held at Lambeth Palace Library, describes the “cruelty of his un-Christian treatment of their unhappy slaves.” Un-Christian. Not illegal. Not unacceptable. Not a matter for the courts. The strongest word that institution had in its vocabulary, the word that means you have violated the thing we exist for, applied by the Church to conduct on the Church’s own plantation. They knew. They named it. They wrote it on paper in the sharpest language available to them. Then they put it in a drawer and kept the estate for another ninety seven years. Bishops read the mail On 21 December 1733, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, sat down with correspondence from the Attorney General of Barbados about arrears on the colony’s tax on enslaved people. A bishop, going through a tax bill on human beings. Nobody can call this a dormant endowment ticking over in a ledger nobody opened. The mail came. The mail was read. The mail was answered. There was a man in a mitre keeping track of what the Crown charged him per head. The school they built and could not enter In 1745, the profits opened a school on the grounds. Codrington College. Funded by the sugar. Raised on the labour. White boys only. They cut the cane that paid the masons. They carried the stone. Their children could not walk through the door. Warned from their own pulpit in 1783. Kept it fifty five more years. Beilby Porteus, then Bishop of Chester and later Bishop of London, preached the Society’s anniversary sermon at St Mary-le-Bow and told that room to its face that it owed the people it owned “greater humanity and tenderness than is commonly practised by planters.” He pushed the Church to get out of the slave trade entirely. They heard him. The standard he asked for was never implemented. Which kills the last defence anybody offers for this. Nobody gets to say they were a product of their time. Their time walked into their building, stood at their pulpit, wore their robes, and told them to stop. They kept the estate for another fifty five years. 1816: somebody on the island could read Barbados was never quiet. The island rose in what is remembered as Bussa’s rebellion, the largest enslaved uprising in Barbadian history. Among the figures recorded in it is Nanny Grigg, an enslaved domestic worker who could read, who followed newspaper coverage of the debates in England about a slave registry, and who worked out from the planters’ own panic that freedom was coming. She was right about the direction. She was early about the date. The uprising was crushed. Hundreds were killed. The plantations went back to work. The Church’s estate went back to work. 410 people. £8,558 2s 2d. Paid to the Church. In 1834 Britain abolished slavery and paid compensation. Not to the people who had been enslaved. To the people who had owned them. Twenty million pounds of public money, the largest payout in British government history to that point, handed to slaveholders for the loss of their property. The Society filed a claim. The paperwork survives, cataloged by University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery database as Barbados claim 4215. Claimant: The Honourable Reverend Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Filed 9 May 1836. Treasurer of record: James Heywood Markland. Number of human beings: 410. Award: £8,558 2s 2d. USPG’s own account of the same settlement cites £8,823. Argue over the shillings if you want. The number that matters is the one that never appears on the form. The people received nothing. No land. No wages. No back pay for one hundred and twenty six years. What they got was a word. Apprenticeship. It meant continuing to work for their former owners without pay, and on the Codrington estates it ran until 1838. The Church had already been paid. They were still cutting cane. The counting had been running long before the money arrived. The UCL database preserves the Barbados slave registers for the College estate at Codrington under the Society’s trustees. 119 people in 1817. 130 in 1823. 140 in 1826. 149 in 1829. 152 in 1832. Names entered. Ages entered. Increases and decreases logged. Decreases. That is where a death went. Somebody sat down with a pen, moved a human being from one column to another, and posted the page to an organisation run by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The apology took until 2006 The Society held the estates until 1983, when stewardship passed to the Codrington Trust. The school that opened for white boys in 1745 became an Anglican theological college by 1830 and stands today as the seminary that trains clergy across the Caribbean. Black priests now study on ground bought with the bodies of Black people the Church branded. At Oxford, All Souls kept calling its library the Codrington Library until 2020, when the college stopped using the name. The statue of Christopher Codrington stayed in the middle of the room. The college committed £100,000 to Codrington College in Barbados, endowed £6 million for the Hugh Springer Scholarships funding graduate studentships for Caribbean nationals of Black or Mixed Black heritage, and in 2021 pledged £1 million over ten years to Oxford’s Black Academic Futures programme. In February 2006, the General Synod voted unanimously to apologise. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told the Synod the Church had to own its “corporate and ancestral guilt,” and that the body of Christ shares “the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors.” In 2023 the Church Commissioners announced a £100 million fund for healing, repair and justice, running from 2023 to 2031, after researchers traced Queen Anne’s Bounty to £13,907 of South Sea Company shares purchased in April 1720. In 2024 the independent Oversight Group told the Church that £100 million was not enough and recommended the effort grow toward £1 billion. USPG pledged 18 million Barbadian dollars, around £7 million, over ten to fifteen years starting in autumn 2024, and said it is “deeply ashamed” of its past. So the Church of England has now issued two documents about these people. A receipt in 1836 and an apology in 2006. One hundred and seventy years apart. Only one of them came with money attached, and it went the wrong way. What would the world be without Black people? There would be no Codrington College. No library at All Souls in the shape it stands. No £2,000 a year “clear of all Charges” running out of Barbados into English missionary work for over a century. The Church of England’s reach across the eighteenth century world was financed, in part, by people it owned, whipped, and marked with a hot iron. And there would be no theology to argue with either. The doctrine that baptism does not free you was not invented in a vacuum. It was written because Black people kept asking the obvious question, and asking it in a way that could not be ignored. If I am now your brother in Christ, why am I still your property? Fleetwood answered that in 1711 the way an institution answers when the honest answer costs money. Every argument running right now about reparations, about restitution, about whether sorry means anything without a number behind it, is an argument those people started. They asked it first. In a chapel. With a brand on their chest. One more thing about the word Of every word in the English language, they picked that one. Society. As in civilisation. As in the thing they said they were bringing. They burned their own alibi into the skin of the people it was an alibi for. They wrote the crime directly onto the evidence, and then spent three hundred years hoping nobody would read it. Somebody read it. Sources * Codrington Plantations, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codrington_Plantations) (Codrington dates, 1702 will, 763 acres, 315 enslaved in the will, branding, 1740 mortality, 1745 college, £8,823 8s 9d figure) * Legacies of British Slavery, University College London: Barbados claim 4215 (Codrington) (https://lbs.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/6568) (claimant, 410 enslaved, £8,558 2s 2d award, filed 9 May 1836, James Heywood Markland) * Legacies of British Slavery, UCL: College (Codrington) estate record (https://lbs.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/8595) (parish, attorney Forster Clarke, slave register counts 1817 to 1832) * USPG, The Codrington Project (https://uspg.org.uk/codrington-project/) (1710 bequest, 1712 to 1838 operation, 190 to 440 enslaved at any time, 600 to 1,200 total, whip in the field abolished September 1829, 1983 transfer to Codrington Trust, BBD $18 million pledge, apology wording) * Fulham Palace, Church of England’s plantations in Barbados (https://www.fulhampalace.org/resistance/church-of-england-plantations/) (”three hundred negros at least kept always thereon,” branding for recapture, 1745 school for white boys only, Bishop Edmund Gibson 1733 correspondence, Beilby Porteus quote) * USPG Online Exhibition, The Codrington Plantation, Bodleian EMLO portal (https://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/uspg/collections/show/3) (1711 Fleetwood sermon, 1745 grammar school, 1836 compensation, Bodleian USPG X/14 Barbados Committee Papers) * Matthew Blake Strickland, “Civilizing Slavery: Imperialism, Anglicanism, and African Slavery in Barbados,” University of Florida, 2019 (https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/05/61/06/00001/Strickland_M.pdf) (Fleetwood’s 1711 report of “upwards of 2000£ per Annum, clear of all Charges”) * Centre for Literacy in Slavery / “Christopher Codrington and the Business of Slavery” pamphlet (2024) (https://cls-uk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/codrington-pamphlet.pdf) (£10,000 and 12,000 books to All Souls, Governor of the Leeward Islands 1700 to 1704, Fleetwood baptism argument, SPG baptism vow wording, no baptisms by 1726, Nanny Grigg and 1816) * All Souls College, Oxford, The Codrington Legacy (https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/codrington-legacy) (£10,000 bequest, library name, statue, £100,000 to Codrington College, £6m Hugh Springer Scholarships endowment, £1m Black Academic Futures pledge 2021) * Church Commissioners for England, Historic Links to Enslavement FAQ (https://www.churchofengland.org/about/governance/national-church-institutions/church-commissioners-england/who-we-are/historic-links-enslavement/frequently-asked-questions) (£13,907 South Sea Company shares April 1720, £100m fund 2023 to 2031, Oversight Group £1 billion ambition, Lambeth Palace Library letter of 25 April 1741) * History News Network, “Anglican Church offers apology for its role in slavery” (February 2006) (https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/anglican-church-offers-apology-for-its-role-in-sla) (unanimous Synod vote, Rowan Williams quotes, branding with “Society,” Archbishops and Bishops on the SPG governing body) * The Church of England, The Church and the legacy of slavery (https://www.churchofengland.org/church-and-legacy-slavery) (2006 apology, “corporate and ancestral guilt”) * J. Harry Bennett Jr., Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710-1838, University of California Press, 1958. The standing academic study of the estates. Catalog record (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/101394264) * Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Way Black When is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe (https://wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

4. 

   12 Aug 2026

   Harvard Said They Were Too Black To Build That.

   What would the world be without Black people? Well, there would be no need to invent a tribe of imaginary foreign kings just to whitewash who really built two hundred and fifty five pyramids in the Sudanese desert. Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. More than double. Most people have never heard that sentence in their life, and that is not an accident. It is the end result of one man's career. If nobody taught you that, do not feel bad. That was on purpose. Subscribe and Share WayBlackWhen for more buried stories they tried to erase.. He dug up the tombs of five Black pharaohs with his own hands and still wrote that Black Africans could not have built any of it. His name was George Andrew Reisner. Harvard called him a founding father. He found kingdoms, kings, and queens that the rest of the world had never heard of, and then he stood over what he found and decided it belonged to somebody else. The man Harvard called a founding father Reisner was born in Indianapolis on November 5, 1867, and by the time he died at Giza on June 6, 1942, he had built the resume that American Egyptology still measures itself against. Harvard B A. in 1889 M A. in 1891. A PHD in Semitic languages in 1893. Professor of Egyptology at Harvard from 1914 until his death, curator of the Egyptian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1910 until his death, and for forty three straight years the director of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, the operation that put American archaeology on the map. He excavated twenty three sites across Egypt and Sudan. He found the tomb of Queen Hetepheres, mother of the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid at Giza. He kept working through the entire First World War, when every other foreign mission on the Nile shut its doors and went home. Egyptologist Alan Gardiner called him one of the greatest excavators Egypt has ever known, and nobody serious about the field disputes that assessment of his method. Hold onto that. The method was never the problem. The man was excellent at finding things and catastrophic at admitting what he had found. Then, in 1907, the Egyptian government asked him to survey the cemeteries of ancient Nubia, in what is now Sudan, ahead of flooding caused by the raised Aswan Dam. That job introduced him to a civilization Western scholarship had never taken seriously. From 1913 onward, Reisner turned his attention south, to a site called Kerma. He was the first archaeologist to properly dig it. He was also the first to decide, before the evidence justified it, who deserved credit for what he found there. What came out of the ground at Kerma Kerma sits south of the Third Cataract of the Nile. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Kush, one of Africa's earliest urban civilizations, with an organized city functioning there as early as 2000 BC and a golden age that ran for well over a thousand years. Reisner's team spent 1913 through 1916 in Kerma's cemetery, and what they found was staggering. Massive royal burial mounds. A vast cemetery holding thousands of graves. At the burial of one Kerma ruler, archaeologists documented nearly three hundred people sacrificed and interred alongside him, a scale of royal funerary ritual that has no equal anywhere else on the Nile at that period. Inside that same cemetery, in 1913, Reisner found a stone statue of a woman named Lady Sennuwy, the wife of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian governor named Djefaihapi. Museum of Fine Arts curator Lawrence Berman later called it the most beautiful Middle Kingdom statue any American museum had ever recovered. To Reisner, the statue was proof. Egyptian craftsmanship, sitting in a Nubian grave, could only mean Egyptian rule. So that is what he wrote. Reisner concluded that Kerma began as the outpost of an Egyptian governor, and that the powerful kings buried in its enormous tumuli were simply the descendants of that Egyptian administration, gone native but never truly indigenous. He built an entire list of what he called Egyptian viceroys of Kush to support it. A kingdom of pyramids, gold, and mass royal sacrifice, and Reisner's official conclusion was that none of it could have started with the people who were actually living there. One statue outvoted an entire cemetery. The theory that explained it all away Reisner did not arrive at this conclusion by accident. He arrived at it because he had already decided, before he ever picked up a trowel at Kerma, what Black African people were and were not capable of building. In a 1918 bulletin for the Museum of Fine Arts, where he served as curator of Egyptian art, Reisner wrote it in plain language: "The native negroid race had never developed either its trade or any industry worthy of mention, and owed their cultural position to the Egyptian immigrants and to the imported Egyptian civilization." He said it again, more elaborately, in his 1923 excavation report, Excavations at Kerma. There, on page 556, Reisner laid out what he genuinely believed was happening biologically on the ground he was digging up: "the social mingling of the three races, the Egyptian, the Nubian and the Negro resulted in the production of offspring of mixed blood who don't inherit the mental qualities of the highest race, in this case the Egyptian." He went on to reassure his readers that "a proportion of the offspring will perpetuate the qualities of the male parent and thus the highest race will not necessarily disappear." By his own theory, Nubians were a mixed people whose Egyptian blood had lifted them above what he called, in his own words, "the inert mass of the black races in Africa." Read that sentence again. He was not describing a lack of evidence. He had the evidence in his hands, an entire civilization's worth of it. What he lacked was the willingness to let that evidence mean what it plainly meant. That is not a scholar reaching a conclusion. That is a scholar defending one. Reisner was not working alone in this. He belonged to a generation of Egyptologists, alongside Flinders Petrie and Grafton Elliot Smith, who built dynastic Egypt itself on the same premise, a migrating white race supposedly bringing civilization down the Nile to people who could not have built it themselves. Reisner simply carried that premise further south than anyone else had bothered to dig. He found the Black Pharaohs and still could not say it Reisner kept moving south, and the kingdoms kept getting harder to explain away. At Gebel Barkal, the holy mountain sacred to the god Amun, Reisner became the first archaeologist to discover the hidden entrances of Nubia's royal pyramid complexes. He went on to excavate the royal cemeteries at Nuri and El-Kurru, and the pyramid fields of Meroe. At El-Kurru, he uncovered the actual tombs of the kings of Egypt's Twenty Fifth Dynasty: Kashta, Piye, Shabaqo, Shebitqo, and Tanwetamani. These were not obscure regional chieftains. These were the Kushite kings who marched north out of Napata, took Thebes, took Memphis, and ruled the whole of Egypt as legitimate pharaohs for the better part of a century, from their base in what is now Sudan. History remembers them today as the Black Pharaohs. Reisner dug up their graves with his own hands. And still, the man who found the tombs of Africa's own emperors could not fully credit the people who built them. He even misread a skull recovered from a classic Kerma burial as belonging to a king, when it belonged to a woman, an error that later scholarship has had to go back and correct, because his framework left no room for the kind of authority a Nubian woman might have held. That skull sits today in the collection of Harvard's Peabody Museum, still being reexamined. A woman was buried like a monarch and got reclassified as a man, because a king was easier for him to believe than a queen. Fifty years of digging proved him backward Reisner's version of Kerma held for over sixty years, mostly because almost nobody went back to check it. Then, in the 1970s, Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet of the University of Geneva did. Bonnet obtained permission to resume excavation at Kerma in 1977. What his team found, over the following five decades, dismantled Reisner's Egyptian outpost theory piece by piece. Surveys of the necropolis alone turned up thirty thousand additional burials beyond anything Reisner had recorded, making it one of the largest cemeteries in the ancient world. Digging in the urban core, near the massive mudbrick structure known as the Western Deffufa, Bonnet's team mapped an ancient city with organized planning across more than thirty hectares, proof of a functioning urban capital, not a colonial trading post, as far back as 2000 BC. Then came the detail that flipped Reisner's central piece of evidence on its head. That statue of Lady Sennuwy, the one Reisner treated as proof of Egyptian rule over Kerma. Modern scholars now believe it did not arrive in Kerma through Egyptian settlement at all. It arrived because an army from Kerma marched into Egypt, looted its sanctuaries, and carried Egyptian treasures home as trophies and status symbols. The same object Reisner used to prove Egypt ruled Kerma is now understood as evidence that Kerma, at its height, was strong enough to raid Egypt. He had the war trophy in his hands and read it as a colonial receipt. Egypt eventually struck back. Around 1550 BC, Egyptian forces invaded, destroyed Kerma's capital, and pushed their control deep into Nubian territory. That is a real defeat, and this piece will not pretend otherwise. But a kingdom does not get destroyed by a jealous neighboring empire unless it was strong enough to be worth destroying first. Bonnet's later work at Dukki Gel, just north of Kerma, uncovered a fortified Nubian city from the same era, and eventually seven life-size granite statues of Kushite kings from the later Napatan dynasty, physical monuments to the same royal line Reisner had spent his career trying to hand to someone else. The museum he built turned on him In October 2019, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the very institution Reisner served for thirty two years, opened an exhibition called Ancient Nubia Now. Curators Denise Doxey, Rita Freed, and Lawrence Berman built it around a plain admission, printed on the wall for every visitor to read. Like other twentieth century scholars, it said, Reisner "failed to acknowledge the sophistication of ancient African cultures south of Egypt." Doxey put it even more directly in an interview promoting the show. Reisner "got it backwards," she said, because he could not see past the idea that the people of Kush were backward and incompetent. A museum built on his excavations, filled with objects he personally shipped out of Sudan, spent an entire exhibition correcting the man who filled it. It took a hundred and one years to get that sentence onto a wall. So what would the world be without Black people? Well, There would be no gap in the world's memory shaped exactly like the Kingdom of Kush. Sudan is sitting on more pyramids than Egypt, roughly two hundred fifty five against Egypt's one hundred eighteen, built across nearly two thousand years by Kushite kings and queens, and most of them draw fewer than fifteen thousand visitors a year combined. Not because they are less spectacular. Because one influential man spent a forty three year career making sure the world would look at them and see an Egyptian footnote instead of an African capital. Taharqa, one of those Black Pharaohs Reisner personally excavated, is buried beneath the largest pyramid ever raised in Nubia, at Nuri, surrounded in death by well over a thousand funerary figurines. He ruled an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the heart of Sudan. And for most of the last century, the average person walking past a photograph of his tomb would have had no idea a Black king built it, because a Harvard professor decided, before he ever broke ground, that the answer had to be someone else. The kingdom is still there. The pyramids never moved. It just took another archaeologist fifty years, and a museum finally willing to put the correction on its own wall, to say the name Reisner spent his life trying not to say. Kerma. Kush. Napata. Meroe. Built by the people who were already standing there. Subscribe for more documented black history. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe (https://wayblackwhen.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

5. 

   11 Aug 2026

   Arkansas Called A Massacre A Riot For 100 Years

   What would the world be without Black people? Well, There would be no reason for the United States Supreme Court to explain, in writing, that a courtroom surrounded by a mob is not a courtroom at all. It took a body count to force that sentence into existence. Nobody agrees on the exact number. Everybody agrees on how it started. September 30, 1919. A church at Hoop Spur, three miles outside Elaine, Arkansas. Black sharecroppers gathered there at night because daylight meetings got reported straight back to the landowners. Cotton prices were the highest they had been in years. The men picking it were still broke, kept that way by a bookkeeping system only the landlord ever got to check. Under the tenant farming system, landowners kept the books, set the prices, and settled accounts once a year, in their own favor, with no way for a sharecropper to check the math. Some of the men at that meeting had just come home from fighting for the United States Army in France. They came back from a world war unwilling to accept a rigged settle up sheet as the price of being Black in Phillips County. They had formed a union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, led by a man named Robert L. Hill. They hired a lawyer, Ulysses Bratton, to sue the plantation owners for an honest accounting of what their cotton had actually earned. That was the entire plan. Get paid. Get a lawyer. Get receipts. If nobody taught you that, do not feel bad. That was on purpose. Subscribe and Share WayBlackWhen for more buried stories they tried to erase.. Here is what asking for an honest accounting cost them. A Church At Hoop Spur Cars pulled up outside the church that night. Shots came out of the dark. When it ended, a white security guard for the Missouri Pacific Railroad named W.A. Adkins was dead, and a white deputy sheriff, Charlie Pratt, was wounded. To this day nobody can prove who fired first. What happened next did not wait to find out. By morning, word had spread through Phillips County and across the river into Mississippi that Black sharecroppers were planning an uprising to unalive every white family in the Delta. It was not true. It did not need to be. The Rumor Becomes An Army Close to a thousand armed white men poured into Phillips County by the next day, some driving in from Mississippi. Local leaders wired Governor Charles Brough for help. Brough secured roughly 500 federal soldiers from Camp Pike, some military orders list the number at 583, and rode the train down himself. The Arkansas Democrat reported the troops arrived under orders to shoot to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately. Some units did exactly that. Others, by their own soldiers’ later accounts, turned machine guns on Black families as they came out of hiding, thinking they had finally been rescued. Brough later called the response “absolutely under control.” He meant it as praise. Four Days In Phillips County From September 30 to October 2, white posses and federal troops swept through the fields, the cane brakes, and the homes of Phillips County. Families were hunted while picking cotton. Men were pulled off trains nowhere near the church at Hoop Spur. Captured Black residents were marched into a commandeered schoolhouse turned stockade and interrogated for any tie to the union. One man, judged too insolent for a mob’s taste, was doused in kerosene, set on fire, and shot. Homes were destroyed. Families scattered as far as Chicago and never came back. Every hater who rode with that mob went home free. Every survivor who ran out of the fields went straight to a cell. A group of white planters, businessmen, and elected officials formed what they called the Committee of Seven, supposedly to investigate the cause of the trouble. In practice, they decided who got arrested, whose testimony counted, and who would be blamed for it in the newspapers. Governor Brough met with them personally and accepted their version of events, in exchange for their promise that no lynchings would take place in nearby Helena, as if that promise covered what had already happened out in the fields. The secretary of a nearby Black fraternal lodge later said he personally paid death benefits for 103 members. He said the lodge’s own people knew of at least 73 more who had died in the violence and were never entered on any official list. Colonel Isaac Jenks, the officer commanding the federal troops, filed a report claiming his own men had killed exactly two Black people. A Memphis Press correspondent on the ground that same week wrote that many more had been killed by the soldiers themselves. Both accounts cannot be true. Only one of them was ever treated as the official record. Five white men died during the violence. At least one, by several accounts, from friendly fire. Their five deaths were the only ones Arkansas ever formally investigated. Two Hundred, Count Uncertain Nobody knows exactly how many Black people were unalived in Phillips County that week, and that not knowing is not an accident. Modern historians, including the Equal Justice Initiative, put the number at 200 or more. The most conservative sourced range runs from 100 to 237 documented deaths, with credible modern estimates reaching well into the hundreds beyond that. A Southern journalist writing in 1925, no friend to Black Arkansans, put the toll at over 800. State investigators took depositions, filed reports, and kept careful records on all five white deaths. No agency ever conducted an equivalent inquiry into how many Black residents of Phillips County simply did not come home that week. A state that could name every one of its white casualties never built a list for its Black ones. Charged With Their Own Massacre When the shooting stopped, 122 Black men were indicted by a Phillips County grand jury. Not one white man was charged with anything. Twelve were sentenced to death. Sixty seven more were sent to prison. The trials for the twelve took less than an hour each, some closer to 45 minutes. The all white juries heard no defense witnesses, because the defense called none. Later sworn affidavits from white men who had been in the room described Black witnesses being whipped and tortured until they gave the state the testimony it wanted. Men were sentenced to die in a courtroom a mob was standing outside of, on evidence beaten out of other Black men. That was the entire case against them. Scipio Africanus Jones Goes To Washington NAACP field secretary Walter White, light skinned enough to pass, traveled into Phillips County disguised as a white reporter and got the story out before he was identified and told to leave town or be unalived himself. Ida B. Wells published her own account the following year, titled it The Arkansas Race Riot, using the very word the state would hide behind for the next hundred years. A man named Scipio Africanus Jones took the case. He had been born into slavery near Tulip, Arkansas, in 1863, the son of an enslaved teenager named Jemmima Jones. He taught himself law, became the first Black attorney to build a real record of appearances before the Arkansas Supreme Court, and by 1919 was the most respected Black lawyer in the state. He took on the Elaine Twelve alongside white attorney George Murphy. The Arkansas Supreme Court rejected their first appeal in 1920. In 1921, two white witnesses came forward with sworn affidavits describing exactly how the testimony against the Elaine Twelve had been extracted. NAACP president Moorfield Storey argued the case before the United States Supreme Court on January 9, 1923. On February 19, 1923, the Court ruled 6 to 2 in Moore v. Dempsey. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority that a trial conducted under mob domination is without due process of law and absolutely void. For the first time, federal courts could reach into a state’s own criminal conviction and overturn it, if the trial itself had been poisoned by a mob. Governor Thomas McRae commuted the last death sentences on November 3, 1923. The final men were not released from prison until January 13, 1925. Five years, three months, and thirteen days after they walked into a church to ask what their cotton was actually worth. What Elaine Bought The Rest Of Us Every American who has ever had a wrongful conviction reviewed by a federal court because the trial itself was compromised by mob pressure or public hysteria is standing on ground that twelve condemned sharecroppers and one self-taught Black attorney had to force open with their own case. Moore v. Dempsey is the decision legal scholars point to when they explain why the federal system can step into a state court at all. It became the foundation later civil rights era rulings built on, part of what eventually widened into the sweeping federal habeas corpus protections defendants rely on today. Nine years later, the Supreme Court leaned on that same due process reasoning in Powell v. Alabama, the Scottsboro Boys case, another set of Black defendants railroaded through a courtroom under mob pressure. The line runs straight from a church in Hoop Spur to a legal doctrine still cited whenever a state trial gets accused of being a lynching with better paperwork. Nobody in that church on September 30, 1919 was trying to reform American constitutional law. Twelve men just did not want to die for a shooting they did not start. A Hundred Years Of The Word Riot For most of the twentieth century, Arkansas history books, state records, and reference works called this the Elaine Race Riot. Even now, one of the standard reference sites for Black American history titles its own entry “Elaine, Arkansas Riot,” then spends nearly every paragraph underneath correcting itself. The word riot did specific work. It implied the sharecroppers started something. It let the state file its Black dead under their own alleged crime. In 2019, ahead of the hundredth anniversary, Arkansas lawmakers tried and failed to pass an official state apology. The same year, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the victims and recognizing the legal legacy of Moore v. Dempsey. The federal government could say the word massacre before Arkansas’s own statehouse could. On September 29, 2019, a privately funded memorial went up in Court Square Park in Helena-West Helena, 25 miles from Elaine itself, a location some Elaine residents felt stole the story from the ground it actually happened on. A 14,000 pound cenotaph, carved with one line: dedicated to those known and unknown who lost their lives in the Elaine Massacre. Known and unknown. A hundred years later, and the state still could not commit to a number. So. What Would The World Be Without Black People? Well, There would be no Moore v. Dempsey. No ruling on the books saying a mob outside a courtroom voids everything that happens inside it. No legal doorway for a state prisoner, of any color, to argue in federal court that a conviction was extracted by terror instead of evidence. Twelve sharecroppers who walked into a church to ask for an honest cotton count ended up rewriting how far the United States Constitution reaches into a state courthouse. They did it from death row. They did it with a lawyer who had been born enslaved thirty miles from where he later argued their innocence. They did it after white men killed as many as several hundred of their neighbors, and the state responded by charging the survivors with the crime. Their names are not on the Phillips County grand jury list that survived. Most of them are not written down anywhere. They are known and unknown, on a slab of concrete in a park 25 miles from where they died, because for a hundred years, unknown was the only category Arkansas was willing to give them. There are more of these. We have a lot more of these. But start with this one. Hoop Spur church, September 30, 1919. A cotton field turned into a killing field because a group of Black farmers wanted a fair count of what they were owed. Arkansas called it a riot for a hundred years. The people it happened to called it what it was, and eventually the Supreme Court had no choice but to agree with them. Elaine, Arkansas, 1919. Hundreds of Black sharecroppers dead, twelve men sentenced to die for surviving it. Sources * Elaine Massacre of 1919, Encyclopedia of Arkansas (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/elaine-massacre-of-1919-1102/) * Elaine (Phillips County), Encyclopedia of Arkansas (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/elaine-phillips-county-6112/) * Moore v. Dempsey, Encyclopedia of Arkansas (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/moore-v-dempsey-5200/) * Scipio Africanus Jones (1863-1943), Encyclopedia of Arkansas (https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/scipio-africanus-jones-2427/) * Elaine massacre, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_massacre) * Elaine, Arkansas Riot (1919), BlackPast.org (https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/elaine-arkansas-riot-1919/) * Scipio Africanus Jones (1863-1943), BlackPast.org (https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/jones-scipio-africanus-1863-1943/) * The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb Racial Disparities of the Justice System, Smithsonian Magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/death-hundreds-elaine-massacre-led-supreme-court-take-major-step-toward-equal-justice-african-americans-180969863/) * On Sep 30, 1919: 200 or More Black People Killed in Elaine, Arkansas, Massacre, Equal Justice Initiative (https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/sep/30) * Sept. 30, 1919: Elaine Massacre, Zinn Education Project (https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/elaine-massacre/) * The Ghosts of Elaine, Arkansas, 1919, Jerome Karabel, The New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/09/30/the-ghosts-of-elaine-arkansas-1919/) * Military Intervention, UALR Elaine Massacre Exhibit (https://ualrexhibits.org/elaine/100-years-ago/military-intervention/) * Moore v. Dempsey: With Justice Deferred, UALR Elaine Massacre Exhibit (https://ualrexhibits.org/elaine/100-years-ago/judicial-approach/moore-v-dempsey/) * Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923), Justia (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/86) * 1923: Supreme Court rules in Moore v. Dempsey, Mississippi Today (https://mississippitoday.org/2025/02/19/1923-moore-v-dempsey/) * To Those Known and Unknown: The Elaine Massacre Memorial, Arkansas Times (https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2019/08/02/to-those-known-and-unknown) * About, Elaine Massacre Memorial (https://www.elainemassacrememorial.org/about) * Two Cities, Two Historic Massacres, Arkansas Times (https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/06/14/two-cities-two-historic-massacres-memory-and-trauma-in-tulsa-and-elaine) * The Story Of The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre That You Didn’t Learn In School, All That’s Interesting (https://allthatsinteresting.com/elaine-massacre) * CRI 2019 Arkansas, congressional record listing H.Res. 150 (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRI-2019/html/CRI-2019-ARKANSAS.htm) Way Black When is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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6. 

   10 Aug 2026

   The Church Burned Her Alive For A Black Jesus

   What would the world be without Black people? Nobody would have needed to build a bonfire for a twenty two year old woman whose entire crime was suggesting that the Holy Family might have looked like the people kneeling in front of it. Not a war. Not a coup. A sentence. She said Jesus was born in Kongo. They lit her on fire for it. If nobody taught you that, do not feel bad. That was on purpose. Follow and Share WayBlackWhen for more buried stories they tried to erase.. Kongo had a Black Catholic bishop in 1518, and the Vatican did not consecrate another Black African bishop for roughly four hundred years after him. Her name was Kimpa Vita. Kongo was Catholic before England was Forget whatever picture you were handed. The Kingdom of Kongo was not waiting to be discovered. It was not converted at gunpoint. It converted itself. In 1491, King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized and took the name João I. His son, Mvemba a Nzinga, took the throne in 1509 as Afonso I and made Catholicism the state religion of a sovereign African kingdom. Not a colony. Not a mission field. A kingdom that read, wrote, kept archives, and sent diplomats. Then it went further than Europe was ready for. On 5 May 1518, Pope Leo X consecrated Afonso’s son, Henrique Kinu a Mvemba, as Bishop of Utica. A Kongolese prince, born in 1495, wearing a mitre, given a see, ordained in Rome. He returned to Kongo in 1521 and died in 1531. The first known bishop from central Africa in history. Then four hundred years of nothing. That is not a gap. That is a decision. So by the time Kimpa Vita was born, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two centuries. Its people prayed the rosary, kept feast days, carried crucifixes, and named their children Beatriz, Pedro, António, João. This was not borrowed faith. It was theirs. They had been in it longer than the Church of England had existed. Remember that. It makes what happened to her worse, not better. The kingdom breaks On 29 October 1665, Portuguese colonial forces from Angola met the Kongolese army at Mbwila, also written Ulanga or Ambuila. Kongo lost. King António I was killed on the field and beheaded. That is the hinge. Everything after it is collapse. The kingdom fractured into rival royal houses, each with its own claimant, its own mountain fortress, its own army. The capital, São Salvador, known to Kongolese as Mbanza Kongo, was sacked repeatedly and finally abandoned in 1678. The cathedral stood open to the sky. The bush grew through the streets of a city that had held tens of thousands of people. And the war made a product. Prisoners. Two rival Kongolese armies capturing each other year after year, and Portuguese and Dutch buyers waiting at Luanda and on the coast with ships bound for Brazil and the Caribbean and Carolina. The civil war did not just destroy Kongo. It fed the Atlantic. That is the world Kimpa Vita was born into. Around 1684, near Mount Kibangu, in the eastern highlands of what is now northern Angola. Her family were mwana Kongo, nobility of royal stock. Her father held military command. She was baptized Beatriz. She was also trained as an nganga marinda, a spiritual mediator whose job was to diagnose what was wrong with a community and name it out loud. She moved inside the Kimpasi society, the initiation network that handled collective affliction. She grew up holding both halves of Kongo in her hands. Catholic sacrament and Kongolese diagnosis. She never saw them as enemies. That is exactly what she would be executed for. The saint in her head She got sick. Badly. The kind of sick people do not come back from. In her account, a friar appeared to her. Capuchin habit. He told her he was Saint Anthony of Padua, that God had sent him into her head, and that he was there to preach to the people and announce the restoration of the kingdom. She recovered. And she told everyone that Kimpa Vita was dead. That the woman standing in front of them was Saint Anthony, and had been since the fever broke. Then she started teaching. Jesus was born in Mbanza Kongo. Baptized in Nsundi, the northern province. Mary was born of a woman held in slavery in a Kongolese noble house. Kongo was the Holy Land. Bethlehem was not somewhere else. It was here. She taught that Black people came from the fig tree. She rewrote the Salve Regina into a prayer her people called the Salve Antoniana. She threw out the parts of the imported liturgy that made Kongolese people foreigners in their own faith, and kept the parts they had made their own. Drumming. Dancing. Kongolese saints for Kongolese people. She told them the crucifix was not the point. Christ was killed on it. Why would you carry the murder weapon and call it protection. And then the line that ended her. Salvation was not in the sacraments the missionaries controlled. It was in your intention. Recorded in the historical accounts of her movement: their deliverance was in their own hands, and not in the hands of a foreign God whose saints did not look like them. Notice what that actually threatens. She was not attacking Christianity. She was removing the middleman. If a Kongolese woman can speak for a saint, and Kongo is the Holy Land, and salvation runs through intention rather than through European priests, then the Capuchin mission is not the road to God. It is a toll booth. They understood that immediately. She took the capital back with nothing but people In 1705, Kimpa Vita walked into the ruins of São Salvador and stayed. She set up in the wreck of the cathedral. And people came. Thousands of them. They cut back the bush, cleared the plazas, and refilled a capital that had been empty for twenty seven years. A city three warring kings with standing armies could not reoccupy, a twenty one year old woman reoccupied with a message. She sent out disciples she called Little Anthonys, each one carrying the movement into a different province, each one telling the rival claimants the same thing. Stop. Reunify. Come home. This was not mysticism floating above politics. This was a peace plan. She was trying to end a civil war that was feeding her people into slave ships, and she was the only person in Kongo who had actually gotten the capital repopulated. King Pedro IV was sitting on his mountain at Kibangu, one claimant among several, and she asked him to come down and take the throne in a real city. He did not thank her. Because here is what a king sees when a woman with no army fills his capital and the country listens to her. He sees that she does not need him. He sees that legitimacy has moved, and it did not move to him. One noble did see the opportunity. Pedro Constantinho da Silva, called Kibenga, allied with her, calculating that the Antonian movement could carry him to the throne. So now she was not just a prophet. She was a faction. That made her killable. A baby cried She preached chastity. Then she became pregnant by a man recorded as João Barro. She left the capital to give birth in secret near her home country. Pedro IV’s people found her because they heard the baby. That is the whole arrest. No siege. No battle. No informant. A newborn made a sound. The trial nobody has a record of She was tried under Kongo civil law, on charges of heresy and witchcraft. The two Capuchin missionaries in the country, Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca, questioned her about her beliefs. Da Gallo’s written account is the reason we know as much as we do. The man who helped destroy her is the reason her words survived at all. No transcript of the trial itself survives. On 2 July 1706, at Evululu, Kimpa Vita was burned alive. João Barro was burned with her. She was twenty two years old. Her infant son was not killed. He was taken from her and handed to the missionaries. She had named him António. Lorenzo da Lucca renamed him Jerónimo. They took her life, then her movement, then her son’s name. They burned her. It kept going. Killing her did not kill it. That is how you know it was real. The Antonians held São Salvador for nearly three more years under Kibenga, praying her prayers in the city she had refilled. On 15 February 1709, Pedro IV marched on the capital with an army reported at twenty thousand. The Antonians were routed. Kibenga tried to invoke a royal pardon in the middle of the collapse. Nobody listened. He was killed and beheaded. Pedro IV took São Salvador and restored it as the capital of Kongo that same year, 1709. He restored the city she had refilled. He did it on the ground she cleared. And the version that got written down was the one where she was a witch and he was the restorer. Now follow where her defeated followers went. Kongo’s civil wars converted losing sides into cargo. Captives moved through the ports to the Americas. In the American Historical Review in 1991, historian John Thornton published a study arguing that the Kongolese who launched the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina on 9 September 1739, the largest uprising of enslaved people in the mainland British colonies before the Revolution, were Kongolese Catholics with military training, marching under a banner, out of exactly this world of war. Kongo’s dead prophet, Kongo’s broken war, and a road in South Carolina thirty three years later. The same people. The same century. The same fire. So what would the world be without Black people? You would not have the first documented mass movement in African history to take a European religion, keep the faith, and refuse the ownership. That is what Antonianism was. Not rejection of Christianity. Repossession of it. Every African independent church that followed is standing in her shadow. Kimbanguism in the Congo. Matswanism. Tokoism. Millions of people across central Africa today worship inside traditions that do exactly what she was burned for doing, which is insisting that God did not need European management to reach African people. Every Black Jesus you have ever seen in a church, on a wall, in a film, in a mural painted by a neighborhood that had to make its own images, is downstream of an argument she made out loud in 1704 and paid for with her body in 1706. And the record itself. The Kingdom of Kongo is the reason you cannot honestly say Christianity came to Africa with colonialism. Kongo was Catholic before the Reformation. It had a bishop before Henry VIII broke with Rome. The people who told you Africans needed to be brought to God were selling something to a continent that had already gotten there on its own terms, and then burned a woman for saying so. In Uíge, Angola, there is a public university called Universidade Kimpa Vita. Students walk under her name every day. Three hundred and twenty years after a church helped a king turn her into ash, the name is still standing and the men who lit the fire are footnotes in her story. She was twenty two. She had a newborn. She had no army, no throne, and no protection. She refilled a dead capital with nothing but a sentence, and the sentence was that God looked like the people praying. They burned her for it on 2 July 1706, and then they took her baby and changed his name, because erasing her was not enough. They needed her not to have continued. She continued anyway. Kimpa Vita. Subscribe for more documented black history Sources * John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684 to 1706, Cambridge University Press, 1998. https://books.google.com/books?id=3epSy0OPsrIC (https://books.google.com/books?id=3epSy0OPsrIC) * John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” The American Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 4, 1991. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/96/4/1101/64483 (https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/96/4/1101/64483) * Dictionary of African Christian Biography, “Kimpa Vita.” https://dacb.org/stories/congo/kimpa3-vita/ (https://dacb.org/stories/congo/kimpa3-vita/) * Dictionary of African Christian Biography, “Kimpa Vita” (second entry). https://dacb.org/stories/congo/kimpa-vita/ (https://dacb.org/stories/congo/kimpa-vita/) * Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, “Kimpa Vita.” https://www.cdamm.org/articles/kimpa-vita (https://www.cdamm.org/articles/kimpa-vita) * The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Women Leaders in African History: Dona Beatriz, Kongo Prophet.” https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/dona-beatriz-kongo-prophet (https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/dona-beatriz-kongo-prophet) * New York Public Library, “Kimpa Vita of the Kingdom of Kongo: Embodiment of Resistance,” 4 October 2021. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/10/04/kimpa-vita-kingdom-kongo-embodiment-resistance (https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/10/04/kimpa-vita-kingdom-kongo-embodiment-resistance) * Executed Today, “1706: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese Saint Anthony.” https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/07/02/1706-dona-beatriz-kimpa-vita-kongo/ (https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/07/02/1706-dona-beatriz-kimpa-vita-kongo/) * Wikipedia, “Kimpa Vita.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimpa_Vita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimpa_Vita) * Wikipedia, “Battle of São Salvador” (15 February 1709). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_S%C3%A3o_Salvador (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_S%C3%A3o_Salvador) * Wikipedia, “M’banza-Kongo” (abandonment 1678, reoccupation 1705, restoration 1709). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%27banza-Kongo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%27banza-Kongo) * Wikipedia, “Henrique of Kongo (bishop)” (consecrated 5 May 1518 by Pope Leo X). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrique_of_Kongo_(bishop) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrique_of_Kongo_(bishop)) * Universidade Kimpa Vita, Uíge, Angola. https://unikivi.ao/ * Britannica, “M’banza Congo.” https://www.britannica.com/place/Mbanza-Congo (https://www.britannica.com/place/Mbanza-Congo) This is a public episode. 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