“ The one-time pharmacist Julien-Joseph Virey publishes his very influential Histoire naturelle du genre humain (Natural History of the Human Genus), in which he posits that Africans are closer to animals and can be considered a distinct species. His later works are more overtly polygenist. Source: “Profiles of: 1. White Man 2. Black Man 3. Ape.” From Jean-Julien Virey, Histoire Naturelle...,. (Natural History of the Human Genus), 1826. ”
— 1801
“ The final years of the Haitian Revolution. Freedom for all enslaved peoples is proclaimed by the brilliant military strategist Toussaint Louverture. In 1802, Napoleon attempts to reimpose slavery and retake Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was called then. In 1803, French armies are resoundingly defeated. In 1804 the Empire (later Republic) of Haiti is declared by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Slavery is nonetheless re-imposed in France’s other Caribbean colonies. (Source: Auguste Raffert, designer; Hébert, engraver. “Attack and taking of the Crête-à-Pierrot (March 24, 1802).” Engraving, 1839. ”
— 1801-1804
“Abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade by act of Parliament, but not slavery itself in the British colonies. Source: John Raphael Smith, after painting by George Morland. Execrable Human Traffic. 1791. Hand-colored engraving. ”
— 1807
“ Abolition of the US transatlantic slave trade, but not slavery itself. Source: The slave deck of the bark “Wildfire,” brought into Key West on April 30, 1860. Wood engraving from original daguerreotype. ”
— 1808
“Abbe Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire publishes his De la littérature des Nègres (An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes), a major antislavery work that begins by refuting the era’s increasingly race-based views of Africans. He will be castigated as a negrophile. Source: Thomas Gainsborough. Ignatius Sancho. 1768. Oil on canvas. Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. ”
— 1808
“In his Philosophie zoologique (Zoological Philosophy), the naturalist Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck posits that primates transformed into humans, and that Africans were the logical missing link between Whites and primates. Source: Ota Benga, described as being taken at Bronx Zoo. 1906. Photograph.
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— 1809
“Spain abolishes slavery in most cases in its colonial possessions, but definitively ends the practice only in 1867, followed by Portugal two years later. Source: Cancino Fernandez Luis. Simon Bolívar granting freedom to slaves in 1816. Watercolor. Bogota,Casa-Museo 20 de Julio. ”
— 1811
“The French naturalist Georges Cuvier publishes Le Règne animal (The Animal Kingdom). A proponent of the single origin of all human types (monogenesis), he nonetheless espouses the theory of catastrophism, which posits that traumatic natural events isolated certain human populations from their forebears 5,000 years before his own day. In his view, this gave rise to the inferior Mongolian and black Ethiopian races. Source: Sawtche, named Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman in Europe. Plate from Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier, Histoire naturelle des mammifères avec des figures originales, coloriées, dessinées d’après des animaux vivants, 1824. ”
— 1816
“The United Kingdom establishes treaties with Spain and Portugal. The terms greatly restrict their participation in the slave trade. Source: Johann Moritz Rugendas. A Slave Market in Brazil. Hand-colored engraving. From Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil (Paris: Engelmann & Cie., 1835). ”
— 1818
“Simon Bolívar issues his address to the Congress of Angostura, where he calls for the abolition of slavery in liberated territories. Source: Allegory of the abolition of slavery. Lithograph. Ca. 1854. (Caracas: Litografía y tipografía del comercio). ”
— 1819
“Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher and proponent of German idealism, posits a philosophy of history around the concept of race. Hegel believes that Black Africans are an undeveloped people who have been left out of history due to their geographical isolation from the rest of the world and their supposed failure to form political states. These ideas infuse the work of later racist scholars. Hegel is nonetheless an ardent abolitionist: “in rational states,” he proclaims, “slavery no longer exists.” Source: Timbuktu. From Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855, 1857-58. Lithographed frontispiece. ”
— 1830
“The Slavery Abolition Act is passed by British Parliament. Reparations are to be paid to former slave owners. The measure is to take effect in British West Indian colonies one year later, but only after passing through a transitional system of unpaid “apprenticeships.” Complete freedom came only in 1838. Source: Alexander Rippingille, after painting by. To the Friends of Negro Emancipation. 1834. Engraving. London, Victoria & Albert Museum. ”
— 1833
“Samuel George Morton, an American ethnographer, publishes a series of books, including Crania Americana (American Skulls), in which he asserts that he could determine the intellectual potential of a given race simply by measuring the typical size of its brain. Source: Samuel George Morton, George Coombe. Crania Americana: Or, A Comparative View Of The Skulls Of Various Aboriginal Nations Of North And South America, 1839. ”
— 1839–1849
“Fifty-three enslaved Africans aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad take control of the vessel off the coast of Cuba. Source: Hale Woodruff, Mutiny on the Amistad. 1938-39. Mural. Oil on canvas. Savery Library, Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama/National Museum of African American History. ”
— 1839
“ Chemical analysis of the dark coloration of the eye by the Swedish scientist Jons Jacob Berzelius ultimately leads to the coining of the term “melanin.” Today it is used more broadly to describe the pigmenting material responsible for the wide range of human skin and hair color. Source: Portrait of Berzelius, unknown artist and date. ”
— 1840
“ J. M. W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) is exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. Source: J.M.W. Turner. Slave Ship, 1840. Oil on canvas. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. ”
— 1840
“Slavery definitively abolished in all French colonies by the revolutionary government of the Second Republic. Slaves are first bought by the government from their owners, then formally liberated. Source: Auguste Biard, Emancipation from slavery, 1849. Oil on canvas. ”
— 1848
“Rise of the racist American School of Ethnography. Among its proponents is the aforementioned naturalist Samuel George Morton. Morton’s views, which uphold racial hierarchy (and thus white superiority) as scientific fact, are codified in Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s widely read Types of Mankind (1854). Source: Josiah Clark, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological researches…, 1854. ”
— 1850s
“The Scottish abolitionist and anticolonialist Robert Knox publishes The Races of Men, in which he advances the existence of fixed racial types, asserting that each group can only flourish in its own environment, hence his belief that the native inhabitants of countries will always repel settlers. Knox even believed that native Americans would eventually expel White settlers. His scorn for nonwhite races extended not only to the “negroid” but also to the loathsome Celts. Source: Johann Zoffany. Death of Captain Cook in Hawaii, 14 February, 1779. 1795. Oil on canvas. National Maritime Museum, London. ”
— 1850
“The Scottish abolitionist and anticolonialist Robert Knox publishes The Races of Men, in which he advances the existence of fixed racial types, asserting that each group can only flourish in its own environment, hence his belief that the native inhabitants of countries will always repel settlers. Knox even believed that native Americans would eventually expel White settlers. His scorn for nonwhite races extended not only to the “negroid” but also to the loathsome Celts. Source: Wax figure of Robert Knox. Edinburgh, Surgeons’ Hall Museum. ”
— 1850
“Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau publishes his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races), which asserts that race is the most important explanatory criterion in understanding the human species. Excerpts from the book, which castigates racial mixing and posits the existence of an “Aryan” master race, would later be taught in schools in Nazi Germany. Source: Benjamin Henry Latrobe. “An Overseer Doing his Duty,” 1798. ”
— 1853–1855
“Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, the foundational text in the history of evolutionary biology. The theory of natural selection will soon be appropriated by race theorists in order to explain the supposed primacy of the white race. Later, in his 1871 The Descent of Man, Darwin debunks the concept of polygenesis to emphasize the fact that differences among human groups are superficial and come about through the indiscriminate process of sexual selection. He is not immune to the prejudices of his era, however. He claims that Australian Aboriginal people and Black Africans are closer to the great apes. Source: “Bungaree, A Native Chief of N.S. Wales.” Ca. 1829-38. Hand-colored lithograph. Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia. ”
— 1859
“American Civil War. Southern secessionists, asserting the principle of states’ rights to justify slavery, are ultimately defeated by the Union. Slavery is legally abolished in the United States with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Source: Thomas Nast, designer. The Emancipation of the Negroes – The Past and the Future. Harper’s Weekly, 1863. Hand-colored wood engraving. ”
— 1861–1865
“ The German scientist Carl Vogt asserts in his Lectures on Man that there is a kinship between Africans and apes, and that Whites are a separate species. Source: “Tree of Evolution, with Gorilla, Schimpanzee, Orang-Otang, and Black Man.” From Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie Oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen ... . (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1874). Pl. XI. ”
— 1864
“Jose Antonio Saco publishes Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo (History of the Enslavement of the African Race in the New World), a monumental history of New World slavery that traces slavery’s origins back to Egypt and other civilizations. Although an abolitionist and intellectual leader of Cuban independence, Saco saw Africans as a threat to Cuba’s future national identity. Source: “Negersklave mit Weinschlauch in Kastilien” (Chained black slave carrying wine sack). 1530s. From Christoph Weiditz, “Trachtenbuch.” Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum. ”
— 1879
“Francis Galton coins the term “eugenics” to describe selective breeding for human beings. His idea is to encourage the procreation of the “fit” (educated White people) over the “unfit.” His concern with the “betterment of the [white] race” has a detrimental effect on African Americans in particular, leading in many cases to sterilization and confinement. Source: “How It Could End … So It Will Happen.” Eugenics poster at the exhibition Wonders of Life in Berlin in 1935 showing demographic projections under the assumption of higher fertility of the “inferior” (Minderwertige) relative to that of the “superior” (Höherwertige).
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— 1883
“Slavery is abolished in Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888), the last strongholds of the “peculiar institution” in the New World. Source: Marc Ferrez. “Slaves at a Coffee Yard in a Farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo.” 1882. Platinum print. Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Moreira Salles. ”
— 1880s
“Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, opens a new chapter in the history of racialized thinking when he devises tests to measure the mental abilities and learning habits of schoolchildren. His methods are adopted by American psychologists, leading to the creation of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test. The standardized survey purports to measure innate intelligence but fails to account for external conditions that influence children’s exposure to intellectual enrichment. Results are detrimental to Blacks due to prejudiced assumptions of “white” cultural norms. Source: Reproduction of an item from the 1908 Binet-Simon intelligence scale, showing three pairs of pictures, about which the tested child was asked, “Which of these two faces is the prettier?” From J. W. Wallace Wallin, “A Practical Guide for Administering the Binet-Simon Scale for Measuring Intelligence,” March 1911. ”
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