Slavery in Black and White

The complete, unfiltered, and deliberately uncomfortable history of slavery—from ancient Mesopotamia to the Congo mines powering your smartphone—told by the person born to tell it.

Everyone knows about American slavery. Almost nobody knows the whole story.

Tyrus has built a career on saying what other people are afraid to say. In Slavery in Black and White: The Whole Damn Story Nobody Wanted to Tell, he brings that same unflinching directness to one of the most explosive and deliberately misunderstood subjects in human history.

This is not the version of slavery they taught you in school. It covers the Arab slave trade that enslaved up to eighteen million people over a thousand years; the Barbary pirates who took over a million white Europeans captive; the African kingdoms that built commercial enterprises around selling their own people; the Black slaveholders documented in American census records; the Native Americans who were both enslaved and enslaving; the Constitutional clauses that protected slavery from the very founding of the republic; the convict leasing system that replaced slavery the day emancipation was declared; and the 49.6 million people living in modern slavery right now, including over a million in the United States.

Tyrus grew up mixed-race in America, raised by a white mother who didn't know how to navigate his Black heritage and a Black father who wasn’t worth following. He burned the victim card decades ago. What he has instead is the truth—all of it, from every direction, with no agenda except accuracy.

Slavery in Black and White is the whole damn story. Finally.