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