On September 14th, 1889 officers for the Navassa Phosphate Company attacked their Black workforce. The violence occurred on Navassa Island, an uninhabited Caribbean Island valued for its phosphate deposits. In the days and months that followed, officers pinned the blame for the violence on their Black employees. This story has held ever since. Workers, however, said something else. Their refusal to remain quiet exposed the company’s long history of malfeasance, but it is a story that has not been adequately told until now.

Dennis Patrick Halpin is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech and author of A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920. He is currently working on a book that explores the life and worlds of Henry Jones, an African American laborer convicted of murder while working on Navassa island.