In May of 1900, the Southern Society for the Study of Race Problems held a conference in Montgomery, Alabama. Bowing to local pressure, it barred African Americans from participating. As T. Thomas Fortune, one of the leading black journalists of the day, commented in the New York Age, this was like “putting Hamlet on the stage with Hamlet left out.”

Predictably, this group of white Southerners offered answers to the “Negro Question” ranging from segregation to the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the removal of African Americans from the United States. Writing to Booker T. Washington after the conference, Fortune insisted: “We can’t trust white men North or South to shape thoughts for us. We must do it ourselves.”

Much like that Alabama conference, Rob Rapley’s 2013 TV mini-series The Abolitionists excises African-American voices from the abolitionist struggle in the United States, skewing the history of one of the nineteenth century’s most important social movements.