The South's plantation agriculture depended on slaves for cheap labor; northern states profited financially from the slave trade. White society used scripture, history and science to justify slavery, just as it later used them to justify segregation. Southern states restricted slave activity and tried to prevent uprisings with laws and "codes"

Many African Americans fought against bondage by stealing from their owners, escape, arson, even homicide. They broke tools, injured work animals, and pretended to be ill in the field or on the auction block. As a last resort, some committed suicide. Some slaves and free blacks tried to use the courts, publications and other means available in white society to improve their condition. They petitioned Congress, presidents and legislatures. Some saved enough money to buy their own freedom. Free blacks did what they could to help their brothers and sisters in bondage. As early as 1817, nationwide conventions of free blacks voiced opposition to slavery, and advocated full rights for all. The convention continued to the present day as a useful means to exchange information and find a collective voice for grievances.

Nat Turner (1800-1831), who felt he was ordained by God for a "great purpose," organized one of the most famous slave revolts in North America. Turner saw an eclipse on August 13, 1831 as a sign from heaven that he should "arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons." One night, he and several sympathizers murdered over 50 white people before they were caught by the militia. Nat Turner hid in the woods for six weeks before he was discovered, found guilty and hanged. His actions and those of other revolt leaders terrified white Southerners, who responded with harsher slave codes.

In 1849, Boston schoolgirl Sarah C. Roberts challenged the constitutionality of separate schools when she sued the city for the right to attend the public school with white children. Her lawyer, Charles Sumner (1811-1874), clearly foreshadowed the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case over a century later in his denunciation of segregated schools. Roberts lost her case, and the decision formed the basis for the "separate but equal" decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that remained law until 1954.

Dred Scott (ca. 1795-1858) sued for his freedom in a Missouri state court, arguing that he had become free when he went to Illinois and Minnesota with his owner. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court said that Scott became a slave again when he re-entered Missouri. The case reached the United Stated Supreme Court, which decided Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people had always been considered "subordinate and inferior" in this country. The words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, wrote Chief Justice Roger Taney, were never meant to include African Americans, therefore, Scott couldn't legally stop slaveholders from taking their human "articles of merchandise" anywhere in the country. The Dred Scott decision made all anti-slavery laws, such as the Missouri Compromise, unconstitutional.

Harriet Tubman (ca. 1821-1913), sometimes called the "Moses of Her People," reputedly led hundreds of slaves to freedom, making dozens oftrips to the South as a "conductor" for the Underground Railroad. Tubman carried a gun on her journeys and threatened to shoot those whose courage failed on the way. "You'll be free or die!" she warned. Supporters in the South and North provided food, shelter, clothing and hiding places for her "passengers."

Isabella Baumfree (ca.1797-1883) was freed when New York abolished slavery in 1827. Although she couldn't read, she spoke out forcefully for equal treatment and education for African Americans. In 1843 she changed her name to Sojourner Truth to symbolize what she felt was her God-given mission in life: to travel and preach for abolition, temperance, prison reform and women's suffrage. While working in a Washington, DC, hospital during the Civil War, Sojourner Truth often had to travel on errands throughout the city. Once, when a conductor told her to move to the segregated section of a streetcar, she refused. Like Rosa Parks many years later, she quietly informed him that she was a passenger, that she didn't fear his threats, and she knew the law as well as he did. The conductor allowed Sojourner Truth to remain in her seat.

Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass (ca. 1817-1895) became a noted antislavery lobbyist, an eloquent speaker, a newspaper editor and, in 1889, United States Minister to Haiti. Like the freedom fighters of a century later, Douglass grew impatient with the slow progress from court battles and politics, and sought faster routes to equality. Douglass argued not only against slavery, but the right of blacks to serve in the Civil War, the political and civil rights of women, and many other causes involving human liberties.

William Lloyd Garrison was a Boston abolitionist who demanded immediate freedom for slaves. He published reformist views in his newspaper, The Liberator, and promoted his efforts through the American Antislavery Society. Many objected to his radicalism, which included women's rights. Just as civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s knew that involvement by whites would draw support and sympathy from others to the movement, Garrison proved effective in bringing his message to the white community.

John Brown (1800-1859) believed that "slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could." He didn't think talk or politics would ever abolish the system, and chose more direct action. He helped antislavery settlers move to Kansas, and when pro-slavery men burned Lawrence, he retaliated by killing five of them in Pottawatamie. Frederick Douglass said of Brown that he was a white man "in sympathy a black man, as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery." John Brown wanted to create a safe place for fugitive slaves in Virginia, and led a raid on the government arsenal at Harper's Ferry in preparation for a slave revolt. The militia stormed the arsenal, and Brown was hanged for treason.