In the popular lexicon, Black Madonnas are “revered statues or paintings of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus with dark skin, found in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, notably the Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland. These icons, often dating from the 12th–15th centuries, are associated with miracles, fertility, and protection, with skin tones often attributed to candle smoke, aging materials, or symbolic representation.” In other words Black Madonnas are viewed as an exception; depictions of Jesus’ mother as a black woman in European countries, as opposed to the white Virgin Mary of the status quo. Mary was not European, nor was her son. Even the term “Middle Eastern” seems evasive of humanity’s subsuharan Africa origins. It must have been jarring for enslaved women to hear the stories of the women in the Bible. Venerated for qualities they saw in themselves, breastfeeding, nuturing, preparing food, bathing children that were not theirs, with no reward. Watching their children sold away in slavery, often by their white fathers. Sometimes at live auctions. The Black Madonna to these women is not some abstract painting or accidental smoke residue, it is embodied.

Between 1986 and 1990, archaeologists excavating the Annapolis Carroll House uncovered physical evidence of enslaved African religious practice—crystals, shells, and ritual objects—hidden beneath the foundations of one of the most powerful slaveholding families in colonial America.

What Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin don’t acknowledge is that the Biblibal Moses was African. Not the Greco-Roman-Anglo fiction depicted in Jefferson and Franklin’s American mythology. 

Europeans, specifically the Portuguese, initiated the Atlantic slave trade out of jealousy for a black Malian king named Moses. Europeans wanted Mansa Musa’s wealth in gold and slaves.

Before the Portuguese brought Catholicism to the Kongo, the African people with whom the Atlantic slave trade began, already knew of an incarnation of Moses. In the 14^th-century, before a three-hundred-year global freeze, an Arabic king named Mansa Musa (‘Priest King Moses’ in Arabic) dominated Western Africa, the same region where European slavery began.

Harriet Tubman was not alone. There were many Black Moseses before her, enslaved people aspiring to free their people from the pharaoh.

The same way five generations of men named Charles Carroll used their shared name to consolidate inherited power, Tupac turned the name Clinton inside out and made it a weapon pointed back at the institution.

Launching 3/14

This book traces a single unbroken thread: the conjure tradition that enslaved Africans used to survive, resist, and outlast the most powerful slaveholding dynasty in American history