Prohibition Targeted Black Businesses: The Racist History of Alcohol Laws.

Photographer, Marion Post Wolcott, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

In September 1906, white mobs descended on Atlanta's Black neighborhoods, killing more than 25 people and destroying countless businesses. The massacre wasn't spontaneous—it was the culmination of a months-long propaganda campaign by white newspapers that fabricated stories about Black saloons to justify exactly this kind of violence.

In the decades after the Civil War, one man's journey from slavery to success became legendary in Washington DC. Dick Francis, born enslaved, transformed himself into the capital's most celebrated bartender—so skilled and successful that he earned enough to send his son to medical school, forever changing his family's trajectory.

Artistic depiction of Monticello's working buildings along Mulberry Row. Peter Hemings spent his entire life enslaved at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, working as the estate's master brewer in the dependencies where skilled craftspeople created the goods that sustained Jefferson's lifestyle and reputation. The brewing expertise that made Jefferson famous came from Hemings's labor—labor that was never compensated, recognized, or freed.