The Priest Who Made a King Listen

In 1550, an elderly Dominican friar named Bartolome de las Casas stood before the Spanish court at Valladolid and did something almost unthinkable. He argued that the indigenous peoples of the Americas — dismissed by conquistadors as subhuman — possessed souls of infinite worth and deserved the crown's full protection. De las Casas had not always believed this. As a young colonist in Hispaniola, he had owned enslaved workers and profited from their labor.…