Early Days & Slavery Timeline

By: Tameka Woodard

1942

• A black navigator, Pedro Alonso Niño, travels with Christopher Columbus's first expedition to the New World

1739

• Lucy Terry, a slave, composes "Bars Fight," the first known poem by an African American. A description of an Indian raid on Terry's hometown in Massachusetts, the poem will be passed down orally and published in 1855.

1770

• Attucks, an escaped slave, becomes the first Colonial soldier to die for American independence when he is killed by the British in the Boston Massacre.

1776

• A passage condemning the slave trade is removed from the Declaration of Independence due to pressure from the southern colonies

1791

• Benjamin Banneker publishes the first almanac by an blackAfrican-AmericanAfrican American and is appointed by President George Washington to help survey Washington, D.C.

1793

• Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, which makes it a crime to harbor an escaped slave.

1827

• The first African American newspaper in the U.S., Freedom's Journal, is published in New York by John Brown Russwurm and Samuel Cornish

1831

• Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia. Fifty-seven whites are killed, but Turner is eventually captured and executed

1849

• Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery. She returns to the South and becomes one of the main "conductors" on the Underground Railroad, helping more than 300 slaves to escape.

1863

• President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally frees all slaves in the Confederacy

• All these dates are the dates that helped change history for us today. It did not take place right away but eventually it did.