In Praise of Black Women, Volume 2: Heroines of the Slavery Era

Heroines of the Slavery Era weaves oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.
These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil and the Caribbean, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil’s blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest from the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband; Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery; and many others.