Must-know sheet

African American Studies must-know sheet

The dates, people, laws, terms, required sources and debates to know for AP African American Studies, organized by the course's four units, starting with what has changed recently. The exam gives you no reference sheet, so this all comes from memory, but you rarely need an exact year: what matters is placing developments in order, linking them across the diaspora and explaining why they mattered.

What's changed: read this first

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

The course is new, and its framework was revised: AP African American Studies was piloted in 2022–23 and 2023–24, and College Board released a revised framework in December 2023. It became an official AP course in 2024–25, and the first full exam was given in May 2025.
Same framework for 2026–27: The May 2027 exam uses the course description that took effect in fall 2024 (with small corrections made in August 2025). College Board hasn't announced any content changes for 2026–27.
Watch out for pilot-era materials: Videos, review books and worksheets made for the 2022–24 pilot may cover topics that were later cut or renumbered. Check anything you use against this course's 74 topics in 4 units.
Your project counts for 10% of your score: The Individual Student Project (a 3-week research project with a presentation and oral defense, scored by your teacher) is worth 8.5%. A 10-minute written question about your project on exam day adds 1.5%.
The exam-day project question: On exam day you write about one of the sources you used in your project, for example which source helped you most and how. Name the source and explain its effect on your thinking: describing it earns at most 1 of the 2 points.
Fully digital exam: The whole exam, including the essays, is taken in the Bluebook app. The 2027 exam is on Thursday, May 6, 2027, and lasts 2 hours 45 minutes.
Only required content is tested: Exam questions come from the topics, learning objectives and required content in the course framework. The 'Further Explorations' ideas, optional sources and source notes in the course description are for class enrichment and projects, not the exam.
Real exams to practice with: College Board has posted the 2025 and 2026 free-response questions and scoring guidelines (and 2024 pilot questions). Practice with 2025 and 2026 first: the question types and point values were the same both years.

The exam at a glance

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

Section I: 60 multiple-choice questions, 70 minutes, 60%: Questions come in sets of 3–4, each set built on one or two sources (texts, images, maps, charts or art). Up to half the sources are the course's required sources; the rest are new to you but connected to course topics.
Section IB: exam-day project question, 10 minutes, 1.5%: One written question about your own Individual Student Project and its sources. Write in full sentences and name at least one specific source.
Section II: three short-answer questions, 40 minutes, 18%: Question 1 uses a written source, Question 2 a visual source (image, art, map or chart) and Question 3 has no source and asks about a big course theme. Each has 3 or 4 parts (A–C or A–D); in 2025 and 2026 they were worth 4, 3 and 3 points.
Section II: document-based question (DBQ), 45 minutes, 12%: You get five sources and write an argument essay worth 7 points. The topic always comes from the required course content.
Individual Student Project, 8.5%: You choose a topic, research it with sources from several disciplines, then present and answer your teacher's questions in an oral defense. Your teacher scores it with College Board's rubric before the exam.
Unit weights: Unit 1, Origins of the African Diaspora: 20–25%; Unit 2, Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance: 30–35% (the biggest); Unit 3, The Practice of Freedom: 20–25%; Unit 4, Movements and Debates: 20–25%.
The three skill categories: 1, Applying Disciplinary Knowledge: explain concepts, context, connections and how the field studies them. 2, Source Analysis: claims, evidence, perspective, purpose, audience and data. 3, Argumentation: build a defensible claim and support it with evidence and reasoning.
DBQ point 1: thesis or claim (1 point): Answer the prompt with a claim someone could argue with that sets up your line of reasoning, in one place (introduction or conclusion). Restating the prompt doesn't count.
DBQ point 2: context (1 point): Describe a bigger development, before or during the time of the prompt, that helps explain the topic. A passing phrase isn't enough; give a few sentences.
DBQ points 3–4: evidence from the sources (2 points): Describing the content of at least 2 sources accurately earns 1 point. Using at least 3 sources to support an argument earns 2. Don't just quote: explain what each source shows.
DBQ point 5: evidence beyond the sources (1 point): Add at least one specific, relevant fact that isn't in the sources, such as a person, event, law or work, and tie it to your argument.
DBQ point 6: source use (1 point): For at least 2 sources, explain how the author's perspective, the purpose, the historical situation or the audience matters to your argument. Just naming the author's point of view isn't enough; say why it matters.
DBQ point 7: reasoning (1 point): Organize the essay around a type of reasoning, such as cause and effect, comparison, or change and continuity across time or places.
Short answers: how to earn the points: Answer each lettered part in order and in full sentences. 'Identify' needs a specific answer; 'describe' needs more than a term; 'explain' needs the how or why, usually with a 'because' and a specific example.
Reading any source: four questions: Ask who made it and from what perspective, why (purpose), for whom (audience) and what was happening at the time (context). Then ask what it claims, what evidence it uses and what it leaves out.
Reading maps, charts and data: Read the title, key, units and dates first, then describe the main trend or pattern, and finally connect it to course content. Note limits too: what a chart or map can't show, or who isn't counted.

Unit 1 timeline: early Africa to the Atlantic world

Unit 1

About 3000 BCE: Egypt and Nubia: Two of the world's earliest large, complex societies grow up along the Nile. Nubia (also called Kush) supplies gold and luxury goods, and the two compete for control of that trade.
About 1500 BCE–500 CE: the Bantu expansion: New tools and crops (bananas, yams, grains) let West and Central African populations grow, and Bantu-speaking peoples migrate in waves across central, eastern and southern Africa, spreading their languages and skills.
By about 500 BCE: Nok society (present-day Nigeria): One of West Africa's earliest ironworking societies, famous for its pottery and its terracotta sculptures of animals and of people with detailed hairstyles and jewelry.
About 750 BCE: Nubian kings rule Egypt: Nubia conquers Egypt and its kings rule as the twenty-fifth dynasty, often called the Black Pharaohs, for about a century.
About 100 BCE onward: the Aksumite Empire: Aksum (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) grows rich on Red Sea trade linking the Mediterranean, Rome and India. It mints its own coins and writes in its own script, Ge'ez.
300s CE: King Ezana makes Aksum Christian: Aksum becomes the first African kingdom to adopt Christianity, on its own terms and long before European colonialism. Ge'ez is still the church language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
About 600s–1200s: the Ghana Empire: The first of the Sudanic (Sahelian) empires grows rich taxing the gold and salt trade across the Sahara. Ancient Ghana was in today's Mauritania and Mali, not modern Ghana, which borrowed the name at independence in 1957.
1200s–1600s: the Mali Empire: Mali rises as Ghana declines, controls gold fields and trans-Saharan routes, and builds a cavalry with North African horses and imported weapons. Its founding hero, Sundiata, is celebrated in the griots' epic.
1324: Mansa Musa's hajj: Mali's ruler makes his pilgrimage to Mecca with so much gold that word of Mali's wealth reaches Europe. Under him Mali is a center of trade, Islam and learning, and Timbuktu becomes a city of scholars and books.
1375: the Catalan Atlas: A map made by Abraham Cresques on the island of Majorca shows Mansa Musa crowned and holding gold, showing how Europeans saw Mali's wealth and its links to the Islamic world.
1100s–1400s: Great Zimbabwe: Capital of a Shona kingdom in southern Africa that grew wealthy from gold, ivory and cattle. Its huge stone walls and the Great Enclosure show its power and ties to Indian Ocean trade.
1000s–1400s: Swahili Coast city-states: Trading cities from Somalia to Mozambique, united by the Swahili language and Islam, connect inland Africa with merchants from Arabia, Persia, India and China. The Portuguese attack them in the 1500s to seize Indian Ocean trade.
1400s–1500s: the Songhai Empire: The last and largest Sudanic empire. Its wealth falls as Portuguese ships open Atlantic trade with the coast, pulling business away from the desert routes, and a Moroccan invasion in 1591 brings it down.
Later 1400s: Portugal's Atlantic island plantations: Portugal sets up plantations worked by enslaved Africans on Cabo Verde and São Tomé, growing sugar, cotton and indigo. By 1500 about 50,000 Africans had been taken to these islands and to Europe, and the plantations became the model for the Americas.
Late 1400s: Queen Idia of Benin: Becomes the first iyoba (queen mother) of the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria), advising her son, the oba (king), and leading armies in war.
1491: Kongo becomes Catholic: King Nzinga a Nkuwu and his son Nzinga Mbemba (later King Afonso I) choose to adopt Catholicism, building trade ties with Portugal and creating a distinctly Kongolese form of Christianity.
1526: Afonso I's letters to Portugal: Afonso protests to King João III that Portuguese traders are seizing and enslaving Kongo's free people, including nobles' relatives, and asks for limits. Kongo's rulers could not control the trade.
1570s: the King's Fountain painting, Lisbon: The painting Chafariz d'El-Rey shows Africans in many roles in Lisbon, from water carriers and vendors to a mounted Black knight, showing how present Africans were in Iberian cities before the slave trade's peak.
1600s: Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba: Rules in present-day Angola and fights the Portuguese for about 30 years with guerrilla tactics and alliances, while also trading captives to build her power. Women ruled Matamba for decades after her.
1977: FESTAC: An ivory mask of Queen Idia becomes the symbol of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, making her an icon of Black women's leadership.

Unit 1 key ideas and terms

Unit 1

African American Studies: An interdisciplinary field that uses history, literature, the arts, politics and more to study people of African descent in the United States and across the diaspora. Its roots lie in Black writing, art and activism long before it became a college subject.
Black Campus movement (1965–1972): Black students, joined by Latino, Asian American and white allies, protested at more than 1,000 colleges for Black studies courses and more Black students and faculty. San Francisco State's 1968–69 student strike produced the first Black Studies department at a four-year college.
African diaspora: The communities of people of African descent spread around the world, mostly by the transatlantic slave trade. African American Studies looks at the ties between them and Africa.
Correcting the myth of a 'history-less' Africa: A core goal of the unit: early Africa had complex states, trade, learning and art, and was connected to the wider world long before the slave trade. Black writers used ancient Africa from the 1700s on to fight racist stereotypes, and African independence leaders later used it to support self-rule.
Africa's five climate zones: Desert (the Sahara), semiarid (the Sahel), savannah grasslands, tropical rainforest and the Mediterranean zone. Each produced different goods, so the differences encouraged trade between regions.
Africa's five major rivers: The Nile, Niger, Congo, Zambezi and Orange, which carried people and goods through the interior. The continent is also bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean.
Why people settled in the Sahel and savannah: Rivers for trade and travel, fertile land for farming and herding, and a location between the Sahara to the north and the forests to the south made these zones trade crossroads.
Trade goods by zone: Desert and semiarid herders were often nomads, some trading salt; the Sahel traded livestock; the savannah grew grain; the rainforest grew kola nuts and yams and traded gold.
Ethnolinguistic diversity: Africa is home to thousands of ethnic groups and languages. Hundreds of Bantu languages, such as Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa and Kikongo, are spoken today, and much of African Americans' ancestry traces to West and Central Africa.
Trans-Saharan trade: Camel caravans across the Sahara traded West African gold for North African salt and goods. North African traders and scholars brought Islam, which spread through West Africa's rulers and cities.
Mansa: A Mande word for ruler or king, as in Mansa Musa of Mali.
Timbuktu: A trading city in the Mali Empire with a book trade, a famous university and scholars of astronomy, mathematics, architecture and law.
Griots: Respected West African historians, storytellers and musicians, both women and men, who kept a community's history, family records (births, deaths, marriages) and traditions alive through oral performance, such as the epic of Sundiata.
Religious syncretism: Blending a new faith with older beliefs. When rulers in Mali, Songhai or Kongo adopted Islam or Christianity, many people mixed it with local cosmologies, and enslaved Africans carried these blended practices to the Americas.
Practices that crossed the Atlantic: Honoring ancestors, divination, healing practices and group singing and dancing survive in diaspora religions such as Louisiana Voodoo. Enslaved people sometimes held such ceremonies before revolts.
Christian and Muslim Africans: About a quarter of enslaved Africans brought to North America came from Christian societies (many from Kongo) and about a quarter from Muslim societies.
Great Zimbabwe's stone architecture: Massive dry-stone walls protected the city, a hub of long-distance trade; the Great Enclosure was used for religious and political purposes, and its conical tower may have stored grain. The ruins symbolize the wealth and independence of early African states.
Swahili: A Bantu language (its name comes from the Arabic word for coasts) that became the common trading language of the East African coast.
African Catholicism in Kongo: Because Kongo's nobles chose Christianity themselves, without foreign conquest, it spread widely and blended with Kongo art and customs, as in Kongo crucifixes. Kongo names for saints and day names carried over into names like Juan, João and John among early African Americans.
Kongo and the slave trade: Portugal demanded access to captives in return for military help. Kongo's nobles took part but couldn't limit the numbers, and West Central Africa became the largest single source of people taken to the Americas.
Kinship: Extended family ties held many West and Central African societies together and were often the basis of political alliances. Women served as spiritual leaders, advisers, traders, teachers and farmers.
Iyoba: The title of the queen mother in the Kingdom of Benin, first held by Queen Idia, an adviser with real political and spiritual power.
Africans in Europe before the slave trade's peak: From the late 1400s African ambassadors, rulers' children and others traveled to Lisbon, Seville and other Mediterranean ports for diplomacy, schooling and religion, and free and enslaved Africans worked there as servants, boatmen, guards, entertainers, vendors and even knights.
Slavery inside Africa vs. the Atlantic trade: Slavery and slave trading already existed in many hierarchical West African societies, and some African kingdoms grew richer by selling captives. The Atlantic trade turned this into a vast, race-based system of lifelong, inherited bondage.

Unit 2 timeline: from the first Africans in North America to emancipation

Unit 2

1513: Juan Garrido in Florida: A free African conquistador born in Kongo who had lived in Lisbon joins a Spanish expedition to Florida: the first known African in what became the United States.
1526: first known slave revolt in today's United States: Enslaved Africans brought from Santo Domingo to a short-lived Spanish colony on the Carolina–Georgia coast rebel and escape to nearby Indigenous communities.
1528: Estevanico: An enslaved Moroccan man forced to serve as explorer, healer and translator on a Spanish expedition across Texas and the Southwest. He was later killed by Indigenous people resisting Spanish invasion.
1565: St. Augustine, Florida: Founded by Spain; the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European and African origin in the United States.
1619: Africans from Ndongo reach Virginia: About 20 captives taken from the Kingdom of Ndongo (in present-day Angola) arrive in English Virginia, among the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies. People from Ndongo made up the first large group to arrive there.
1656 and 1662: Elizabeth Key and partus sequitur ventrem: Elizabeth Key, daughter of a white father and an enslaved mother, wins her freedom in court in 1656. In 1662 Virginia passes a law making a child's status follow the mother's, so the children of enslaved women are enslaved.
1724: Louisiana's Code Noir: French Louisiana's slave code requires Catholic instruction, regulates enslaved people's lives and marriages and forbids marriage between white and Black people.
1738: Fort Mose: Spanish Florida's governor sets up Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose near St. Augustine under Francisco Menéndez, a Senegambian who had escaped slavery: the first free Black town legally recognized by a colonial government in today's United States.
1739: the Stono Rebellion: Led by Jemmy, a man from the Kongo-Angola region, nearly 100 enslaved people in South Carolina burn plantations and march toward freedom in Spanish Florida. Many were Catholic Kongolese who spoke Portuguese.
1740: South Carolina's slave code (Negro Act): A harsher code passed in response to Stono bans enslaved people from gathering, drumming, being taught to write, running away or leaving the colony, with brutal penalties, up to death, for resisting a white person. British forces also attack Florida and destroy Fort Mose that year.
1773: Phillis Wheatley publishes her poems: An enslaved young woman in Boston becomes the first African American to publish a book of poetry.
1787: the Constitution protects slavery without naming it: The three-fifths clause (Article I, Section 2) counts enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation, and the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) requires escaped people to be returned. The word 'slavery' first appears in the Constitution in the Thirteenth Amendment.
1789: Olaudah Equiano's narrative: His autobiography, published in London, describes his capture as a child in Igbo country and the Middle Passage, and it became a powerful antislavery text.
1791–1804: the Haitian Revolution: Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, led by figures like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defeat French, Spanish and British forces and found Haiti on January 1, 1804.
1793 and 1850: the Fugitive Slave Acts: Federal laws let enslavers capture people who had escaped, even in free states. The 1850 law was much harsher, forcing Northerners to help and denying accused people a jury trial.
1803: the Louisiana Purchase: The cost of fighting in Haiti pushed Napoleon to sell Louisiana, nearly doubling the size of the United States and opening vast land to slavery's expansion.
1808: the US bans the transatlantic slave trade: Importing enslaved Africans becomes illegal (though smuggling continued). Afterward the enslaved population grows mainly through births, and the domestic slave trade expands.
1811: the German Coast Uprising: Charles Deslondes leads up to 500 enslaved people toward New Orleans in the largest slave revolt in US history, inspired by Haiti. It was brutally crushed.
1815: Paul Cuffee's voyage to Sierra Leone: The Black ship captain carries about three dozen African American settlers to Freetown, Sierra Leone: one of the first organized voyages of African American emigrants to Africa.
1816: two very different organizations: The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent Black denomination, is founded in Philadelphia under Richard Allen. The white-led American Colonization Society forms to send free Black people to Africa.
1822: Denmark Vesey's planned revolt: A free Black carpenter and AME member in Charleston plans a large uprising; it is betrayed, and he and dozens of others are executed.
1827: Freedom's Journal and New York abolition: The first African American newspaper begins in New York City. Slavery ends in New York State on July 4, 1827, and Black New Yorkers celebrate on July 5: an early Freedom Day.
1829: David Walker's Appeal: A free Black Bostonian's pamphlet condemns slavery and racism and calls on enslaved people to resist, by force if necessary. It was smuggled into the South.
1831: Nat Turner's rebellion: A deeply religious enslaved preacher leads a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia. Afterward Southern states pass even stricter laws against Black literacy and gatherings.
1831: The History of Mary Prince: A narrative by a woman enslaved in Bermuda and the West Indies, published in London, that fuels the British abolition campaign.
1832: Maria W. Stewart's 'Why Sit Here and Die': One of the first public political speeches by an American woman, urging free Black women to demand education, work and dignity.
1833: Britain abolishes slavery in its colonies: The act freeing enslaved people in the British West Indies took effect in 1834; Black abolitionists celebrated West India Emancipation Day every August 1.
1835–1842: the Second Seminole War: Black Seminoles fight alongside the Seminoles against forced removal from Florida.
1839–1841: the Amistad: Mende captives led by Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) take over the Spanish schooner La Amistad. After a two-year legal fight, the US Supreme Court frees them in 1841.
1841: the Creole revolt: Madison Washington leads enslaved people on a ship carrying them from Virginia to New Orleans to take control and sail to the British Bahamas, where about 130 gain their freedom.
1843: Henry Highland Garnet's 'Address to the Slaves': At a Black national convention in Buffalo, Garnet urges enslaved people to resist their enslavers rather than wait for freedom.
1853: Twelve Years a Slave: Solomon Northup, a free New Yorker kidnapped in Washington in 1841 and enslaved in Louisiana until 1853, describes slave pens, auctions and the cotton fields.
1857: Dred Scott v. Sandford: The Supreme Court rules that Black Americans, enslaved or free, are not and can never be US citizens. That year Frederick Douglass gives his 'West India Emancipation' speech.
1861: Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The first book-length slave narrative by an African American woman, describing sexual harassment by her enslaver and her years hiding in a tiny attic space before escaping. (The course description dates it 1860, the year on its copyright notice.)
1863: the Emancipation Proclamation: Takes effect January 1, freeing enslaved people in Confederate areas still at war and allowing Black men to join the Union military.
1863: the Combahee River raid: Harriet Tubman helps lead a Union raid in South Carolina that frees more than 700 enslaved people: the first major military operation led by an American woman.
1863: New York City draft riots: White mobs, many of them working-class Irish immigrants angry about the draft, attack Black New Yorkers and burn a Black orphanage.
1865: the Thirteenth Amendment: Ratified in December, it abolishes slavery everywhere in the United States, except as punishment for a crime, making permanent the freedom of the roughly 4 million people who had been enslaved.
June 19, 1865: Juneteenth: Union General Gordon Granger's General Order No. 3 tells enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they are free. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.
1866: slavery ends in Indian Territory: Treaties with the large Indigenous nations of the Southeast end slavery there, freeing nearly 10,000 African Americans. Their rights as tribal citizens were not secure: some nations resisted adopting them, and Freedmen's citizenship is still disputed today.
1888: Brazil abolishes slavery: The last country in the Americas to do so.

Unit 2 key ideas and terms

Unit 2

Ladinos and Atlantic creoles: Ladinos were Africans familiar with Spanish or Portuguese culture who came with early European expeditions. They belonged to a generation of Atlantic creoles: Africans who used their knowledge of several languages and customs to work as go-betweens, which gave some of them more mobility.
Roles of Africans in early colonization: Conquistadores (often hoping to earn freedom), enslaved laborers in mines and fields, and free skilled workers and artisans.
Scale of the transatlantic slave trade: Over about 350 years (early 1500s to mid-1800s), more than 12.5 million Africans were forced onto more than 36,000 known voyages. Portugal, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands carried the most.
Where enslaved people were taken: Almost half of the roughly 10.7 million survivors went to Brazil and much of the rest to the Caribbean. Only about 5% (around 388,000 people) came directly to what became the United States, and almost half of those landed at Charleston.
Where people taken to North America came from: Mainly Senegambia and West Central Africa (Angola), about a quarter each, plus regions of today's Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria and Mozambique. Peoples included the Wolof, Akan, Igbo and Yoruba.
Three stages of the forced journey: 1) Capture and a march to the coast, then waiting in crowded coastal prisons. 2) The Middle Passage across the Atlantic, up to about three months, in which about 15% died. 3) The 'final passage': quarantine, resale and transport to distant places of enslavement.
Effects of the slave trade on West Africa: Profits and European firearms fueled wars and raids; some coastal states grew rich while interior societies lived under constant threat of capture; and communities lost the people who would have led them and raised families.
Resistance on slave ships: Captives staged hunger strikes, jumped overboard and organized revolts across language differences. Resistance made the trade costlier and led enslavers to add barricades, nets and guns.
Slave ship diagrams: Drawings like that of the British ship Brookes showed captives packed in rows to maximize profit, and abolitionists spread them to expose the trade. They usually showed far fewer people than ships really carried and left out the guns, nets and force-feeding tools used against resistance.
Slave narratives: Autobiographies by formerly enslaved people that were at once history, literature and political arguments: they aimed to end slavery, prove Black humanity and claim a place in American society.
Domestic slave trade and the Second Middle Passage: After 1808 and with the cotton boom, more than a million enslaved people were sold or moved from the upper South (Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and others) to the lower South: the largest forced migration in US history, which tore families apart.
Gang system vs. task system: In the gang system, groups worked sunup to sundown under an overseer (cotton, sugar, tobacco) and sang work songs to keep pace. In the task system, people worked alone to meet a daily quota (rice, indigo) with less supervision, which helped cultures like Gullah survive.
Skilled and institutional slavery: Enslaved people worked as blacksmiths, carpenters, basket makers, rice growers, musicians and healers, often using skills brought from Africa. Some were owned by churches, factories and colleges, not individuals.
Slavery and the national economy: Northern banks, shippers, insurers and textile mills profited from slave-grown cotton, tying North and South together. Enslaved people produced enormous wealth but could not keep wages or property, which built lasting racial wealth gaps.
Chattel slavery and slave codes: Chattel slavery treated people as property for life, passed to their children, and based on race. Slave codes limited movement, gatherings, weapons, reading and even clothing, across the Americas (the French Code Noir and Spanish Código Negro too).
Limits on free Black people: Some free states barred Black people from moving in or testifying against white people, and many limited voting. By 1860 Black men could vote on equal terms only in five New England states, and only a few more states, such as Wisconsin and Iowa, added the right before the Fifteenth Amendment (1870).
Partus sequitur ventrem: Latin for 'the offspring follows the womb.' It made enslavement inherited through the mother, broke the English custom of status following the father, let enslavers deny children they fathered (often through rape) and turned enslaved women's childbearing into profit.
Race as a social construction: Scholars in many fields agree that race is not a clear biological category: there is more genetic variation within so-called races than between them. Racial categories were created by laws and customs that grew up with slavery.
Hypodescent and the one-drop rule: Hypodescent placed mixed-ancestry people in the lower-status group. The 'one-drop rule' of the late 1800s and 1900s classified anyone with any African ancestry as Black, denying people the chance to claim mixed heritage.
Creating African American culture: Enslaved people blended African, European and Indigenous influences in quilts, pottery (like David Drake's inscribed jars), instruments such as gourd rattles, drums and the banjo, and creole languages such as Gullah.
Spirituals: Religious songs (also called sorrow songs or jubilee songs) that combined Christian hymns with African call and response, clapping, improvisation and syncopation. Their double meanings could carry hope, protest, warnings or escape plans, and they led to gospel and the blues.
Ethnonyms: Names a group uses for itself. Many Black Americans dropped 'African' in the late 1820s to resist the colonization movement; later names include Colored, Afro-American, Negro, Black and African American.
American Colonization Society (1816): A white-led group that aimed to send free Black people to Africa (founding Liberia). Most Black leaders opposed it as a plan to remove them and protect slavery.
Spanish Florida as a refuge: Spain offered freedom to people escaping the British colonies who became Catholic, which drew freedom seekers south and helped inspire the Stono Rebellion.
Global effects of the Haitian Revolution: France lost its richest colony and briefly abolished slavery (1794–1802); sugar production shifted to the United States, Cuba and Brazil; refugees reached US cities; and fear of revolt grew. France later forced Haiti to pay a huge indemnity, paid off over about 122 years, in exchange for recognition.
Haiti as a symbol: The only revolt of enslaved people that overthrew a colonial government. For African Americans it showed the unkept promises of the American Revolution and became a lasting symbol of Black freedom and self-rule, inspiring revolts like the German Coast Uprising and Brazil's Malê revolt (1835).
Everyday resistance: Slowing work, breaking tools, taking food, pretending illness and running away. These acts sustained the wider push for abolition, and churches became places to share news, mourn, celebrate and organize.
Free Black communities: By 1860 about 12% of Black Americans were free. In cities like Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans they built mutual-aid societies, schools, businesses, independent churches and newspapers.
Black women abolitionists: Women like Maria W. Stewart and Sojourner Truth argued that freedom had to include Black women, linking race and gender and helping open the way for the women's rights movement.
Maroons: People who escaped slavery and built free communities in hidden places, like the Great Dismal Swamp or among Indigenous nations; called palenques in Spanish America and quilombos in Brazil. Palmares in Brazil lasted nearly 100 years.
Maroon wars: Maroons sometimes fought wars to defend their freedom: Bayano in Panama (1500s), Queen Nanny in Jamaica (1700s). Other groups signed treaties that required them to help catch runaways and stop revolts.
Slavery in Brazil vs. the United States: Brazil received far more Africans, and freeing individuals (manumission) was common, so most Afro-Brazilians were free before 1888. In the United States, the enslaved population grew through births to about 4 million by the Civil War, the largest enslaved population in the Americas.
African traditions in Brazil: Capoeira (a martial art with music and call and response) and the congada (a festival honoring the king of Kongo and Our Lady of the Rosary) survive today.
Black Seminoles: Freedom seekers who found refuge among the Seminoles in Florida, lived as kin and allies, and fought beside them against removal. Leaders included Abraham and John Horse (Gopher John).
Slavery in the Southeastern Indigenous nations: The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations included enslavers who adopted slave codes and patrols and took enslaved people west on the Trail of Tears. This hardened racial lines and pushed Black and mixed-race members outside their communities.
Emigrationists: Black abolitionists like Paul Cuffee and Martin R. Delany who supported building free Black communities in Africa, the Caribbean or Latin America. Delany saw African Americans as a 'nation within a nation.'
Black nationalism: The idea that Black people should unite, take pride in their identity and determine their own future, through their own institutions or even their own nation.
Anti-emigrationists: Leaders like Frederick Douglass who insisted African Americans were Americans by birthright and should stay to fight for freedom and full citizenship, exposing the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating liberty while enslaving millions.
Moral suasion: The strategy of ending slavery by persuading white Americans that it was morally wrong, through speeches, writing and religious appeals.
Radical resistance: The strategy, urged by David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, of overthrowing slavery through direct action and revolt, with violence if necessary.
The Underground Railroad: A secret network of Black and white abolitionists who helped freedom seekers reach free states, Canada and Mexico; an estimated 30,000 reached freedom. Self-emancipating people themselves took the first and biggest risk.
Photography as resistance: Frederick Douglass (the most photographed American of his century), Sojourner Truth (who sold portrait cards to fund her work) and Harriet Tubman used photographs to show themselves as dignified citizens and fight racist caricatures.
Gender in slave narratives: Laws against rape didn't protect enslaved women. Women's narratives focused on family, modesty and sexual exploitation; men's narratives stressed independence and manhood. Women's accounts fed both abolition and early feminism.
Black soldiers in the Civil War: About 200,000 Black men served in the Union Army and Navy (about 150,000 of them formerly enslaved), at first for lower pay than white soldiers and at risk of enslavement or death if captured. Women served as nurses, cooks, laundresses and spies.
Freedom Days: Black communities have long celebrated local days of emancipation, such as July 5 in New York (from 1827), August 1 for West Indian emancipation and Juneteenth (also called Jubilee Day or Emancipation Day), with music, new clothes, food and dancing.

Unit 3 timeline: Reconstruction to the 1930s

Unit 3

1865: the Freedmen's Bureau: Congress creates the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (1865–1872) to give formerly enslaved people food and clothing, legalize marriages, help reunite families and found schools.
January 1865: Special Field Orders No. 15: General William T. Sherman sets aside about 400,000 acres of coastal land from South Carolina to Florida for freed families in 40-acre plots. President Andrew Johnson reverses it later that year and returns most land to former owners.
1865–1866: Black Codes: Southern state governments under Presidential Reconstruction pass laws forcing freed people into yearly labor contracts, punishing 'vagrancy' and allowing children to be taken for unpaid apprenticeships.
1865–1877: Reconstruction: The federal government brings the Confederate states back into the Union and tries to protect the rights of freed people. Nearly 2,000 African Americans hold office, from local posts to the US Senate.
1868 and 1870: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments: The Fourteenth (1868) makes everyone born in the US a citizen and promises equal protection; the Fifteenth (1870) bans denying the vote because of race, color or previous servitude.
1870: the first Black members of Congress: Hiram Revels of Mississippi becomes the first African American in the US Senate, and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina the first in the House. Blanche K. Bruce (Mississippi, 1875) is the first to serve a full Senate term.
1877: the Compromise of 1877: Settles the disputed 1876 election: Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president and federal troops leave the South, ending Reconstruction. Southern states then rewrite their constitutions to segregate and disenfranchise.
1881: Tuskegee Institute: Booker T. Washington becomes the first leader of the Alabama school, which became the model of industrial and vocational education.
1890: the Second Morrill Act: Requires states that received federal land-grant money to admit students regardless of race or fund separate colleges for Black students, leading to the founding of many Black land-grant colleges.
1892–1895: Ida B. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching campaign: After friends of hers are lynched in Memphis in 1892, the journalist exposes the false excuses used to justify lynching in pamphlets including A Red Record (1895).
1895: the Atlanta Exposition Address: Booker T. Washington tells a mostly white audience that Black Southerners should focus on job skills and economic progress, accepting segregation for now; critics later called it the 'Atlanta Compromise.'
1896: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court upholds a Louisiana law segregating railroad cars, creating the 'separate but equal' doctrine that protected Jim Crow laws until Brown v. Board (1954).
1896: the National Association of Colored Women: Black women's clubs unite nationally, with Mary Church Terrell as first president, under the motto 'Lifting as We Climb.'
1900: 'Lift Every Voice and Sing': Written by James Weldon Johnson with music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson; it became known as the Black National Anthem.
1903: The Souls of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois's essays introduce the 'color line,' 'double consciousness' and 'the Veil,' and challenge Washington's approach.
1904: Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company: Founded in Nashville as the One Cent Savings Bank; it is the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the United States.
1909: the NAACP: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded as an interracial group; founders include W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. It fought mainly through the courts.
1910: the National Urban League: An interracial organization founded in New York City to help Black migrants from the South find jobs and housing.
1910s–1970s: the Great Migration: About six million African Americans leave the South for cities in the North, Midwest and West.
1914–1920s: Marcus Garvey's UNIA: Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica (1914) and builds it in Harlem into the largest pan-African mass movement in African American history; the Black Star Line shipping company follows in 1919.
1915–1926: Carter G. Woodson and Black history: Woodson co-founds the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), starts the Journal of Negro History (1916) and launches Negro History Week (1926), which grew into Black History Month.
1919: the Red Summer: Amid job competition, a flu pandemic and hostility toward returning Black World War I veterans, white mobs attack Black communities in dozens of cities. Black Americans fight back, and Claude McKay's poem 'If We Must Die' becomes their rallying cry.
1921: the Tulsa race massacre: A white mob, joined by city officials, destroys Greenwood ('Black Wall Street'), one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation, burning more than 1,250 homes and businesses and killing many residents.
1920s–1930s: the Harlem Renaissance: A flowering of Black literature, music, art and scholarship centered in Harlem, the best-known part of the New Negro movement.
1925: The New Negro: Alain Locke's anthology defines the New Negro movement; it includes Arturo Schomburg's essay 'The Negro Digs Up His Past.'
1926: 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain': Langston Hughes's essay calls on Black artists to express their own identity and culture proudly instead of imitating white standards.
1933: The Mis-Education of the Negro: Carter G. Woodson argues that American schools taught Black students to see themselves as inferior and that they needed to learn their own history.
1939–1943: Black stars on screen and stage: Ethel Waters becomes the first African American to star in her own TV show (1939), and the all-Black musical Cabin in the Sky plays on Broadway (1940, with dancer Katherine Dunham) and as a Hollywood film (1943).

Unit 3 key ideas and terms

Unit 3

Reconstruction Amendments: The Thirteenth (1865) ended slavery except as punishment for a crime; the Fourteenth (1868) created birthright citizenship and equal protection and overturned Dred Scott; the Fifteenth (1870) protected Black men's right to vote.
Black political power during Reconstruction: Black men voted in large numbers and nearly 2,000 Black officials served. John R. Lynch became Speaker of the Mississippi House, and James T. Rapier of Alabama served in Congress and founded his state's first Black-owned newspaper.
Reuniting families: Freed people searched for relatives sold away, placing 'information wanted' ads in Black newspapers like The Christian Recorder for decades, and made their marriages legal. Many chose new names, and today's family reunions grew out of these searches.
'Jumping the broom': A ceremony many enslaved couples used to mark marriages that the law did not recognize.
Sharecropping: Landowners provided land, tools and seed in return for a large share of the crop, which kept many freed families (and poor white farmers) in poverty.
Crop-lien system: Farmers bought food and supplies on credit against their next harvest; when the crop didn't cover the debt, they fell deeper into debt each year.
Convict leasing: Southern states leased prisoners, mostly Black men arrested for debt, minor offenses or on false charges, to planters and companies, who worked them without pay in brutal, slavery-like conditions.
De jure segregation: Segregation required by law, such as Jim Crow laws. Compare de facto segregation, which exists in practice without being written into law.
Disenfranchisement tools: Poll taxes (a fee to vote), literacy tests (often judged unfairly) and grandfather clauses (which excused white men whose grandfathers could vote before Black men could), backed by violence and Ku Klux Klan terror.
Jim Crow: From a racist 1830s minstrel character; the name for the state and local laws, mostly but not only in the South, that segregated schools, transportation, hospitals and cemeteries and blocked Black voting until the 1950s–60s Civil Rights movement.
The nadir: Scholars' term for the period from the end of Reconstruction to World War II, the low point of American race relations, marked by lynching, mob violence and the loss of rights.
Streetcar (trolley) boycotts: Black communities in many Southern cities boycotted newly segregated streetcars around 1900: an early form of the protest later used in Montgomery.
Armed self-defense: Black communities defended themselves during the nadir and the Red Summer; Ida B. Wells-Barnett urged families to keep a rifle for protection.
The color line: Du Bois's term for the racial barrier of segregation and discrimination that remained after slavery; he called it the central problem of the twentieth century.
Double consciousness: Du Bois's term for the inner conflict of seeing yourself both as you are and through the eyes of a society that looks down on you. It caused alienation but also produced insight, adaptation and resistance.
The Veil and the mask: Du Bois's 'Veil' and Paul Laurence Dunbar's 'mask' are images of how racism cut African Americans off from full participation and made them hide their pain from white society.
Racial uplift: Strategies for Black advancement after slavery, through education, economic progress, respectability, self-help institutions and political action. Leaders disagreed about which to put first.
Black women's leadership and the club movement: Black women rebuilt communities after slavery, worked and organized unions, and through clubs and church groups fought stereotypes and pushed for education and the vote. Anna Julia Cooper argued that the race could rise only if Black women rose.
The Black press: Newspapers such as Freedom's Journal (1827), The Christian Recorder, the Chicago Defender (1905) and the Pittsburgh Courier (1907) carried news, community life and protest, and encouraged the Great Migration.
The Black church: From the AME Church (1816) on, Black churches were centers of worship, culture, safety and organizing, and they trained activists, musicians and political leaders. Their number grew greatly after Reconstruction.
Black businesses: Excluded from white society, Black entrepreneurs built banks, insurance companies and businesses serving Black customers. Madam C.J. Walker, often called the first self-made woman millionaire in the US, sold hair and beauty products through a network of Black women agents and gave to community causes.
HBCUs: Historically Black colleges and universities. Cheyney (1837) was the first founded; Wilberforce (Ohio, 1856), founded with AME Church leaders and bought by the AME Church in 1863, became the first owned and run by African Americans; most were founded after the Civil War. They were the main providers of Black higher education until the 1960s and trained much of the Black professional class.
Liberal arts vs. vocational education: HBCUs followed two models: a liberal arts education (as at Fisk) and industrial and vocational training (as at Tuskegee).
Black Greek-letter organizations: Fraternities and sororities founded by Black students, starting with Alpha Phi Alpha at Cornell (1906) and Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard (1908), that stress scholarship, leadership and service.
Fisk Jubilee Singers: A Fisk University student choir that, from the 1870s, toured the US and Europe singing spirituals, raising money for the school and bringing the music to world audiences.
The New Negro movement: A movement of self-definition, racial pride, political voice and cultural innovation in the early 1900s, which sought a distinct Black aesthetic and produced counter-images to racist stereotypes.
Black aesthetic: The idea of a distinctly Black style and set of values in art, rooted in Black life, history and folk culture, and in pride in African heritage.
Photography and the New Negro: Black photographers like James Van Der Zee portrayed everyday Harlem life (families, couples, athletes, Garveyites) with elegance and dignity, countering the racist images used to justify segregation.
Africa in Harlem Renaissance poetry: Poets like Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen (both wrote poems called 'Heritage') used proud images of Africa to counter stereotypes and reflected on feeling both tied to and cut off from an African past.
Blues: Music with roots in slavery and the rural South, expressing despair and hope, love and loss through repetition, call and response and everyday language. It went electric in Northern cities after the Great Migration.
Jazz: Born in Black New Orleans and reshaped in the North and West, often called America's most original art form; it runs from big band to free jazz. Radio and records spread blues, gospel and jazz nationwide.
The Black intellectual tradition: Black study of Black life began long before college programs: the African Free School in New York (from 1787), Schomburg's collection (now the Schomburg Center), Du Bois's early sociological studies, Zora Neale Hurston's research on Black folk culture and language, and Woodson's histories.
Causes of the Great Migration (push): Lynching and racial violence, Jim Crow, poverty from sharecropping, and crop disasters such as floods and the boll weevil.
Causes of the Great Migration (pull and means): Factory jobs opened by labor shortages in both world wars, plus railroads that made travel possible and the Black press, which urged people to come and told them how.
Effects of the Great Migration: African Americans became a mostly urban people; Southern Black culture spread to New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and other cities; and racial tensions rose, with some Southern employers trying to stop workers from leaving.
Afro-Caribbean migration: More than 140,000 Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrived between 1899 and 1937, mostly in New York and Florida, pushed by island economies hit by World War I and drawn by US influence in the region, such as the Panama Canal. They added religious and language diversity and radical ideas to Black communities, along with some tensions.
Pan-Africanism: The belief that people of African descent around the world share interests and should unite politically and culturally. Du Bois is called the father of modern pan-Africanism; Garvey led its largest mass movement.
Garveyism: Marcus Garvey's message of Black pride, economic self-reliance, separate Black institutions, liberation from colonialism and 'Africa for the Africans.' The UNIA's red, black and green flag is still a symbol of Black solidarity.

Unit 4 timeline: the 1930s to today

Unit 4

1930s–1950s: Négritude and Negrismo: French-speaking writers from the Caribbean and Africa (such as Aimé Césaire of Martinique) launch Négritude in Paris to celebrate Blackness and attack colonialism; Negrismo celebrates African culture in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
1930: the Nation of Islam: Founded in Detroit; Elijah Muhammad leads it from Chicago starting in 1934.
1936: Jesse Owens: Wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, then returns home to segregation.
1930s: redlining becomes policy: The Home Owners' Loan Corporation draws maps grading neighborhoods, marking Black areas red as 'hazardous,' and the Federal Housing Administration's underwriting manual builds segregation into mortgage lending.
1941–1945: World War II: More than a million African Americans serve in a segregated military, including the Tuskegee Airmen and the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.
1942: the Double V campaign and CORE: After a reader's letter, the Pittsburgh Courier launches a campaign for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. The Congress of Racial Equality is founded in Chicago the same year.
1944: the G.I. Bill: Gives veterans money for college, low-cost home loans and business loans, but local officials often denied Black veterans their full benefits.
1947: Jackie Robinson: Breaks Major League Baseball's color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
1954: Brown v. Board of Education: The Supreme Court unanimously rules that segregated public schools violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, overturning 'separate but equal.'
1955–1956: the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Begins after NAACP secretary Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat and lasts more than a year; that same year, the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till shocks the nation.
1957: Little Rock, the SCLC and Ghana: The Little Rock Nine integrate Central High School under federal troop protection; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference forms with Martin Luther King Jr. as president; Ghana wins independence from Britain.
1959: A Raisin in the Sun: Lorraine Hansberry's play about a Black Chicago family's struggles, including plans to move into a white neighborhood, opens on Broadway.
1960: sit-ins, SNCC and the Year of Africa: Greensboro students begin the sit-in movement, Ella Baker helps students found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and 17 African nations gain independence.
1961: the Freedom Rides: CORE-led integrated bus trips through the South test the ban on segregated interstate travel and are met with mob violence.
1963: Birmingham and the March on Washington: Police turn dogs and fire hoses on young marchers in the Birmingham Children's Crusade. In August about 250,000 people join the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, where King gives his 'I Have a Dream' speech.
1964: a turning-point year: The New York City school boycott (464,000 students), Mississippi Freedom Summer and the murder of three civil rights workers, Malcolm X's 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' and the Civil Rights Act.
1965: Malcolm X killed, Selma, Voting Rights Act: Malcolm X is assassinated in February; the Selma marches lead to the Voting Rights Act in August; the Black Arts movement begins (1965–1975).
1966: Black Power, the Panthers and Kwanzaa: 'Black Power' becomes a rallying cry; Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland; Maulana Karenga creates Kwanzaa.
1967: Muhammad Ali refuses the draft: The boxing champion refuses induction to fight in Vietnam, citing his faith and racism at home, and is stripped of his title.
1968: a year of change: The Fair Housing Act bans housing discrimination; Shirley Chisholm is the first Black woman elected to Congress; Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists at the Mexico City Olympics; student protests, starting at San Francisco State, push colleges to create Black Studies programs.
1971: the Congressional Black Caucus and Soul Train: Black members of Congress form the CBC, and Don Cornelius's Soul Train goes national.
1970s: hip-hop is born: Black and Latino young people in the Bronx create DJing, MCing, breakdancing and graffiti; DJ Kool Herc's 1973 party is often called its birthday.
1977: the Combahee River Collective Statement: A Boston Black feminist and lesbian group argues that freeing Black women would require ending all systems of oppression.
1987: Fences: August Wilson's play about a former Negro leagues player in 1950s Pittsburgh opens on Broadway and wins the Pulitzer Prize.
1989–1991: intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw coins 'intersectionality' (1989) and develops it in the early 1990s; Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990) develops the idea of interlocking systems of oppression.
1990: the Americans with Disabilities Act: Builds on civil rights laws by banning discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, public places, transportation and government services.
1992: Mae Jemison: Becomes the first African American woman in space.
2001 and 2005: Black secretaries of state: Colin Powell becomes the first Black secretary of state; Condoleezza Rice succeeds him as the first Black woman in the post.
2008 and 2020: Obama and Harris: Barack Obama is elected the first Black president (2008), and Kamala Harris the first Black vice president (2020).
2016: Colin Kaepernick kneels: The NFL quarterback begins kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, and other athletes follow.
2018: the Obama portraits: Kehinde Wiley's portrait of Barack Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama are unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery.
2021–2022: Juneteenth and anti-lynching law: Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday in 2021, and lynching becomes a federal hate crime in 2022 (the Emmett Till Antilynching Act).

Unit 4 key ideas and terms

Unit 4

Négritude: French for 'Blackness': a political, cultural and literary movement (1930s–1950s) begun by French-speaking Caribbean and African writers to celebrate African heritage and protest colonialism and forced assimilation into French culture.
Negrismo: A Spanish-speaking Caribbean movement of the same era as Négritude that celebrated African contributions to Latin American music, folklore, literature and art. Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén was a leading voice.
Links among the New Negro, Négritude and Negrismo: All three stressed cultural pride and Black liberation and influenced each other (Langston Hughes translated writers across English, French and Spanish), but they didn't always picture Blackness or Africa the same way.
Anticolonialism: Opposition to European rule over Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Négritude writers rejected the claim that colonialism 'civilized' people and showed how racism justified colonial exploitation and forced labor.
The Black Freedom movement: The wider struggle from the mid-1940s to the 1970s that includes both the Civil Rights movement (which ended legal Jim Crow) and the Black Power movement (which built Black consciousness and pride), and it reached beyond the United States.
Diasporic solidarity: Support between African Americans and Africans in shared struggles against racism and colonialism. Visits to newly independent Ghana by King, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Pauli Murray and Du Bois, and the 1960 'Year of Africa,' drew global attention to both fights.
Double V campaign: The Pittsburgh Courier's 1942 call for a double victory: against fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home.
Tuskegee Airmen: The first Black pilots in the US military, trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, who flew in Europe and North Africa; called the 'Red Tails' for their planes' markings.
6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion: An all-Black battalion of more than 800 women in the Women's Army Corps, led by Major Charity Adams, that cleared a huge backlog of soldiers' mail in Europe in 1945.
The G.I. Bill and unequal benefits: The law was race-neutral on paper, but its money was handed out by local and state officials, banks and colleges under Jim Crow, so many of the roughly 1.2 million Black veterans got fewer or no benefits.
The doll test: Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark found that many Black children preferred white dolls, evidence that segregation harmed their self-esteem. The Supreme Court cited their work in Brown.
Resistance to school integration: After Brown, some states defunded integrated schools, some districts closed schools rather than integrate, police were used to block Black students, and white families moved to suburbs or private schools. Many Black teachers lost their jobs.
Redlining: Refusing mortgages in Black neighborhoods and other neighborhoods of color by labeling them high-risk ('hazardous'). It kept Black families from buying homes and building wealth to pass down, and its effects on wealth, health, transit and pollution remain.
Black responses to unequal transportation: Where Black areas lacked good public transit, African Americans ran jitneys (small shared taxis or buses) and started their own bus companies.
The 'Big Four' civil rights organizations: NAACP (1909: lawsuits like Brown), CORE (1942: sit-ins and the Freedom Rides), SCLC (1957: churches and mass marches, led by King) and SNCC (1960: student-led grassroots organizing and voter registration).
Nonviolent direct action: Marches, sit-ins, boycotts, lawsuits and media campaigns. Organizers expected violent responses, and televised attacks on peaceful protesters won national and world sympathy.
Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964): Volunteers registered Black voters and ran 41 Freedom Schools. The murder of three civil rights workers (one Black, two Jewish) drew national attention. The summer also built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged Mississippi's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention.
Group-centered leadership: Ella Baker's idea that ordinary people in local communities should lead, rather than one charismatic leader. It shaped SNCC.
Grassroots organizing outside the South: Black activists fought segregation in Northern and border cities too: Chicago's Coordinating Council of Community Organizations protested segregated schools, and Gloria Richardson led the Cambridge movement in Maryland.
Freedom songs: Songs adapted from spirituals, hymns, gospel and labor songs, often sung in Black churches, that unified marchers and kept up their courage; King called 'We Shall Overcome' the movement's anthem.
The Nation of Islam: A religious movement that combined some Islamic beliefs and practices with Black nationalism. Members often replaced their surnames, seen as given by enslavers, with 'X.' Its teachings differ from mainstream (Sunni) Islam, which Malcolm X embraced after leaving it.
Black Power: A movement from the mid-1960s that stressed self-determination, Black-controlled institutions, racial pride and self-defense, arguing that integration and nonviolence alone had not brought safety or power.
Malcolm X's changing ideas: As a Nation of Islam minister he stressed Black autonomy and self-defense. After leaving in 1964 and converting to Sunni Islam, he took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and focused on pan-African ties, human rights and global protest against injustice.
The Black Arts movement (1965–1975): Writers, artists, musicians and dramatists who saw art as a tool of Black liberation. It produced Black magazines, presses, theaters and journals and helped create the first African American Studies programs.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense: A revolutionary Black Power group inspired by Malcolm X. Its Ten-Point Program demanded freedom, housing, health care, education and jobs, and it cited the Second Amendment for armed self-defense. Clashes with police and the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign followed.
Panther survival programs: Free breakfast for schoolchildren, free health clinics, legal aid and clothing programs. Women made up about half the members and often led local chapters.
Black Is Beautiful: A 1960s movement that celebrated natural hair, African-inspired clothing such as dashikis and head wraps, African and Islamic names and symbols like the Akan Sankofa bird, rejecting white beauty standards. Its rejection of assimilation helped pave the way for ethnic studies.
Kwanzaa: A holiday celebrating African heritage and community values, created by Maulana Karenga in 1966 and held December 26 to January 1.
Afrocentricity: An approach, named by scholar Molefi Kete Asante, that makes Africa and Africa's descendants the center of the story of history. Critics say it can blur differences among African peoples and may replace Eurocentrism instead of challenging it.
Black feminism: A movement, strongest in the 1970s, highlighting how Black women face racism and sexism at once, both in white-led feminism and in Black political movements. It drew on activists like Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
Womanism: Alice Walker's term (coined 1979, made widely known in 1983) for a Black women's feminism that fights racism in the women's movement and sexism in Black communities.
Intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework for how a person's overlapping identities, such as race and gender, combine with systems of inequality to create distinct experiences, like Black women's.
Interlocking systems of oppression: The idea, developed by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins and earlier Black feminists, that race, gender, class, sexuality and ability work together to shape unequal outcomes in schools, health, housing, prisons and wealth.
The Black middle class and the wealth gap: Desegregation, education and urban jobs grew the Black middle class, but past discrimination in housing and jobs left a huge wealth gap: in 2016 the median white family had about $171,000 in wealth versus about $17,150 for Black families.
Black political representation: After the Voting Rights Act, the number of Black elected officials grew about sixfold, from about 1,500 in 1970 to about 9,000 in 2006, with the biggest one-year jump in 1971.
The Congressional Black Caucus (1971): Black members of Congress who work together to support Black candidates and push for reforms in health care, jobs and social programs. Shirley Chisholm was a founder.
A more diverse Black America: The Black population grew about 30% from 2000 to 2019, to about 47 million (about 14% of the US). Black immigrants, mostly from Africa and the Caribbean, nearly doubled, and more people identify as Black and Hispanic or multiracial.
Religion in Black communities today: About two-thirds of Black adults are Protestant and about 20% have no religion; younger adults are less likely to be Protestant. Black churches remain centers of community, debate and activism.
African elements in Black music: Improvisation, call and response, syncopation, storytelling and the joining of music and dance, carried from spirituals to blues, jazz, gospel, R&B and hip-hop, and into rock and roll and Latin jazz.
Rock and roll's Black roots: Performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bo Diddley and Little Richard created it by adding new rhythms and electric instruments to gospel and blues.
The elements of hip-hop: DJing (DJs like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash extended 'the break' and developed turntable techniques such as mixing and scratching), MCing (rap), breakdancing by b-boys and b-girls, and graffiti art. It grew out of the Black Freedom and Black Arts movements and still voices political issues, from Queen Latifah to Kendrick Lamar.
Black film and TV: Oscar Micheaux made dozens of films from 1919 to 1948 that showed Black characters as complex people. Later TV, such as Soul Train, The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Black-ish, showed a wider range of Black life.
Black theater: Black theater companies grew in cities shaped by the Great Migration, staging plays about political and social issues and about Black joy.
Black athletes breaking barriers: Oliver Lewis won the first Kentucky Derby (1875) and Black jockeys won most early Derbies; Black players built the Negro leagues and a Black hockey league in Nova Scotia (1895); Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball (1947).
Athletes as activists: Muhammad Ali (1967), Tommie Smith and John Carlos (1968) and Colin Kaepernick (2016) used their fame to protest racism, at real cost to their careers.
Black contributions to science and medicine: George Washington Carver (soil-restoring crops), NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, astronaut Mae Jemison, surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, Onesimus (who taught colonial Boston about smallpox inoculation) and Kizzmekia Corbett (Moderna Covid-19 vaccine).
Black medical institutions: Barred from white hospitals and the American Medical Association, Black doctors founded hospitals (like Provident in Chicago, 1891), medical schools (Meharry, Howard) and the National Medical Association.
Medical racism and disability: The eugenics movement of the early 1900s targeted Black people and people with disabilities, who faced institutionalization and forced sterilization. Abuses include the Tuskegee syphilis study and the use of Henrietta Lacks's cells without consent.
Afrofuturism: Art, music, film and writing that reimagine Black pasts and imagine Black futures through science and technology: early hints in Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker, and later Sun Ra's music, Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek, and the film Black Panther.
African American Studies today: A field that keeps changing and that studies Black history, literature, politics, art and inequality around the world, including subjects older disciplines left out.

Laws, amendments and court cases

Units 2, 3, 4

Virginia's Act XII (1662): Made a child's status follow the mother's (partus sequitur ventrem), so the children of enslaved women were born enslaved. The idea spread through the other colonies.
Louisiana Code Noir (1724): French Louisiana's slave code: Catholic instruction for enslaved people, rules on their marriages and families, and a ban on marriage between white and Black people.
South Carolina Negro Act (1740): Passed after the Stono Rebellion; treated Black people as presumed enslaved and banned gatherings, drumming, being taught to write and travel, with severe punishments.
US Constitution, Article I, Section 2 (1787): The three-fifths clause: enslaved people, called 'other persons,' counted as three-fifths of a person for seats in Congress, boosting slaveholding states' power.
US Constitution, Article IV, Section 2 (1787): The fugitive slave clause: people 'held to service or labour' who escaped to another state had to be returned. It is the basis for the Fugitive Slave Acts.
Fugitive Slave Acts (1793 and 1850): Let enslavers seize people who had escaped, even in free states. The 1850 act required citizens to help, denied accused people a jury trial and put free Black Northerners at risk of kidnapping.
Alien and Sedition Acts (1798): Federal laws passed partly amid fears, after the Haitian Revolution, that refugees and revolutionary ideas would spread slave revolts.
Ban on the transatlantic slave trade (1808): Ended legal imports of enslaved Africans to the United States. Slavery itself continued and the domestic trade grew.
United States v. The Amistad (1841): The Supreme Court ruled that the Mende captives were free people who had been illegally kidnapped, and they were freed.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): Dred Scott sued for freedom because he had lived in free territory. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be US citizens, so Scott couldn't sue. The Fourteenth Amendment overturned it.
Emancipation Proclamation (1863): Lincoln's wartime order freed enslaved people in Confederate areas still in rebellion, not in the loyal border states, and opened the Union Army and Navy to Black men.
Thirteenth Amendment (1865): Abolished slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the US, except as punishment for a crime, a loophole later used for convict leasing.
Act creating the Freedmen's Bureau (1865): Set up the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to manage abandoned and confiscated land and aid freed people and refugees.
Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865): Sherman's order setting aside coastal land in 40-acre plots for freed families; reversed by President Andrew Johnson.
Black Codes (1865–1866): Southern state laws restricting freed people's property, movement and labor, enforced through labor contracts, vagrancy fines and forced apprenticeships of children.
Fourteenth Amendment (1868): Birthright citizenship for everyone born or naturalized in the US, plus due process and equal protection of the laws. It overturned Dred Scott and became the basis for Brown v. Board.
Fifteenth Amendment (1870): No federal or state government may deny the vote 'on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.' It gave Black men the vote but not women.
Civil Rights Act of 1875: Banned racial discrimination in public places such as inns and theaters. It was rarely enforced and was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883.
Second Morrill Act (1890): Required states to admit Black students to land-grant colleges or fund separate Black land-grant colleges, creating many public HBCUs.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Upheld Louisiana's law requiring separate railroad cars by race, creating 'separate but equal.' In practice it allowed separate and unequal facilities and rights.
Immigration Act of 1924: Set national-origins quotas that sharply cut immigration. Afro-Caribbean immigration fell steeply afterward, the restrictions W.A. Domingo wrote about.
Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual (1938): Guidance for insured mortgages that treated Black neighbors as a risk to property values, writing housing segregation into federal policy.
G.I. Bill (1944): Officially the Servicemen's Readjustment Act: college tuition, cheap home loans and business loans for veterans, administered locally and often denied to Black veterans.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954): A unanimous Supreme Court, in a case argued by the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall, ruled state-required school segregation unconstitutional under the equal protection clause, citing harm to Black children (including the Clarks' doll tests).
Civil Rights Act of 1964: Outlawed segregation in public places and banned job discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: Banned literacy tests and other discriminatory voting rules and put federal oversight on places with a history of discrimination. Black registration and the number of Black officials rose sharply.
Fair Housing Act (1968): Banned discrimination in selling, renting and financing housing; the NAACP fought for its passage.
Americans with Disabilities Act (1990): Banned discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, public places, transportation and government programs, building on earlier civil rights laws.
Juneteenth National Independence Day Act (2021): Made June 19 a federal holiday, more than 150 years after the first Juneteenth celebrations.
Emmett Till Antilynching Act (2022): Made lynching a federal hate crime, after more than a century of failed anti-lynching bills.

Key people

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

Ezana (300s CE): King of Aksum who made it the first African kingdom to adopt Christianity.
Mansa Musa (ruled early 1300s): Mali's ruler whose 1324 hajj displayed Mali's gold to the world and who built Mali into a center of Islam, trade and learning.
Sundiata (Sunjata) Keita (1200s): Founder of the Mali Empire and hero of the epic told by griots.
Nzinga Mbemba / Afonso I (ruled early 1500s): Catholic king of Kongo who built ties with Portugal but protested the slave trade's damage in letters to Portugal's king.
Queen Idia (late 1400s–early 1500s): First iyoba (queen mother) of Benin, adviser and military leader.
Queen Njinga (about 1583–1663): Ruler of Ndongo and Matamba who fought the Portuguese for about 30 years, sheltered people who escaped Portuguese slavery in her army, and also traded in captives.
Juan Garrido (1500s): Kongo-born free African conquistador; the first known African in what became the US (Florida, 1513).
Estevanico (Esteban) (1500s): Enslaved Moroccan forced to explore Texas and the Southwest for Spain.
Francisco Menéndez (1700s): Senegambian who escaped slavery in Carolina and led the free Black militia town of Fort Mose.
Jemmy (1739): Kongo-Angolan leader of the Stono Rebellion.
Phillis Wheatley (about 1753–1784): Enslaved poet in Boston; first African American to publish a book of poetry (1773).
Olaudah Equiano (about 1745–1797): Formerly enslaved writer and abolitionist whose 1789 narrative described capture and the Middle Passage.
Toussaint Louverture (about 1743–1803): Formerly enslaved leader of the Haitian Revolution; captured by the French, he died in prison before independence.
Charles Deslondes (1811): Leader of the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, the largest slave revolt in US history.
Denmark Vesey (died 1822): Free Black carpenter in Charleston executed for planning a large revolt.
Nat Turner (1800–1831): Enslaved preacher who led the 1831 Virginia rebellion, inspired by religious visions.
Madison Washington (1841): Led the revolt on the Creole that freed about 130 people in the Bahamas.
Sengbe Pieh / Joseph Cinqué (1839): Mende man who led the Amistad revolt.
Paul Cuffee (1759–1817): Black ship captain and emigrationist who carried African American settlers to Sierra Leone in 1815.
Martin R. Delany (1812–1885): Black nationalist and emigrationist, doctor, writer and the first Black field officer in the US Army.
David Walker (about 1796–1830): Author of the 1829 Appeal urging enslaved people to resist.
Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882): Minister whose 1843 address called on enslaved people to rise up.
Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879): Boston writer and lecturer; among the first American women to give public political speeches.
Frederick Douglass (about 1818–1895): Escaped slavery, became the leading Black abolitionist, writer and speaker, opposed emigration, and later served as US minister to Haiti.
Sojourner Truth (about 1797–1883): Abolitionist and women's rights speaker who sold portrait cards to fund her work and recruited Black Union soldiers.
Harriet Tubman (about 1822–1913): Escaped slavery, guided dozens of others to freedom on the Underground Railroad, and served the Union as scout, spy and nurse, helping lead the Combahee River raid.
Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897): Author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first book-length narrative by a formerly enslaved African American woman.
Mary Prince (about 1788–after 1833): Bermuda-born woman whose 1831 narrative aided British abolition.
Solomon Northup (born about 1807): Free New Yorker kidnapped into slavery; author of Twelve Years a Slave (1853).
Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce: Mississippi senators: Revels was the first Black senator (1870), Bruce the first to serve a full term.
Joseph Rainey (1832–1887): Born enslaved; first African American in the US House (1870) and the longest-serving Black member of Congress during Reconstruction.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931): Journalist who led the campaign against lynching, a suffragist and an NAACP founder.
Booker T. Washington (1856–1915): Head of Tuskegee Institute who stressed industrial education and economic progress before political rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963): Sociologist and writer (The Souls of Black Folk), NAACP founder and pan-Africanist who demanded full civil rights and higher education; he died in Ghana.
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964): Educator and writer of A Voice from the South (1892), arguing that Black women's education and leadership were essential to the race's progress.
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961): Educator, suffragist and Baptist leader who founded a school for women and girls in Washington, D.C. (1909).
Madam C.J. Walker (1867–1919): Hair-care entrepreneur, employer of thousands of Black women agents and philanthropist.
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938): Writer, diplomat and NAACP leader; wrote 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' and coined the term 'Red Summer.'
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906): Poet of 'We Wear the Mask' and 'The Colored Soldiers.'
Alain Locke (1885–1954): Philosopher who edited The New Negro (1925).
Langston Hughes (1901–1967): Leading Harlem Renaissance poet; 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926); linked the New Negro, Négritude and Negrismo through translation.
Claude McKay (1889–1948): Jamaican-born poet of 'If We Must Die' (1919).
Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950): Historian who launched Negro History Week, now Black History Month, and wrote The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Arturo Schomburg (1874–1938): Black Puerto Rican collector whose library became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960): Anthropologist and novelist who recorded Black folk culture and speech.
Marcus Garvey (1887–1940): Jamaican-born founder of the UNIA and leader of the Back-to-Africa movement.
Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000): Painter of The Migration Series and a series on Toussaint Louverture.
Aimé Césaire (1913–2008): Martinican poet and a founder of Négritude; wrote Discourse on Colonialism.
Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972): Leader of Ghana's independence (1957), educated at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, who welcomed African American visitors.
Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993): NAACP lawyer who won Brown v. Board; later the first Black Supreme Court justice.
Rosa Parks (1913–2005): NAACP activist whose arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968): SCLC leader and voice of nonviolent direct action; led the Montgomery boycott and Birmingham campaign and spoke at the March on Washington.
Malcolm X / el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (1925–1965): Nation of Islam minister and later Sunni Muslim who championed Black self-determination, self-defense and human rights; assassinated in 1965.
Ella Baker (1903–1986): Organizer called the mother of the Civil Rights movement; championed group-centered leadership and helped found SNCC.
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977): Mississippi sharecropper and voting rights leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Dorothy Height (1912–2010): Led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years and worked on the March on Washington.
A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin: Labor and civil rights organizers of the 1963 March on Washington; Rustin, a gay man, faced discrimination within the movement.
John Lewis (1940–2020): SNCC chairman, speaker at the March on Washington and later a longtime congressman.
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale: Founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1966).
Kathleen Cleaver (born 1945): Black Panther leader who encouraged Black people to embrace natural hair and beauty.
Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975): Leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934.
Amiri Baraka (1934–2014): Poet and playwright who helped launch the Black Arts movement in 1965.
Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012): Sculptor and printmaker whose work, made largely in Mexico, celebrated Black women and Black power.
Maya Angelou (1928–2014): Poet ('Still I Rise') who lived in Ghana in the 1960s and joined the 1963 Accra petition.
Alice Walker (born 1944): Writer who coined 'womanist.'
Kimberlé Crenshaw (born 1959): Legal scholar who coined 'intersectionality.'
Patricia Hill Collins (born 1948): Sociologist who developed the idea of interlocking systems of oppression.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000): Chicago poet; first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950); wrote the novel Maud Martha (1953).
Audre Lorde (1934–1992): Poet and essayist on race, gender, sexuality and identity.
Molefi Kete Asante (born 1942): Scholar who named and developed Afrocentricity.
Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005): First Black woman elected to Congress (1968), a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus and a 1972 presidential candidate.
Colin Powell (1937–2021): General, first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and first Black secretary of state (2001).
Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951): Pioneering filmmaker who made dozens of films with all-Black casts that challenged stereotypes.
August Wilson (1945–2005): Playwright of Fences, part of his ten-play cycle on Black life in each decade of the twentieth century.
Sun Ra (1914–1993): Jazz musician whose space-themed music and film Space Is the Place made him a founder of Afrofuturism.

Required written and spoken sources to recognize

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

Afonso I's letter to King João III, 1526 (1.9): Kongo's Catholic king complains that Portuguese merchants are kidnapping and enslaving his free subjects and asks Portugal to limit the trade.
Juan Garrido's petition, 1538 (2.1): Garrido asks the Spanish crown to reward his decades of service as a conquistador.
Phillis Wheatley, 'On Being Brought from Africa to America,' 1773 (2.3): A short poem in which the speaker credits Christianity for her salvation while reminding white Christians that Black people are equally capable of grace and refinement.
Olaudah Equiano's narrative, chapter 2, 1789 (2.3): His account of being kidnapped as a child in Igbo country, sold along the way to the coast and carried through the terror of the Middle Passage.
Plea to the Jurisdiction of Cinque and Others, 1839 (2.4): The Amistad captives' court filing arguing that they were free Africans illegally kidnapped, not property.
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 1853 (2.5): Describes a New Orleans slave pen and auction, including a mother torn from her children, to show the cruelty of the domestic trade.
Slave codes: Louisiana 1724 and South Carolina 1740 (2.7): Read for how law defined slavery as racial and lifelong and controlled enslaved people's religion, families, movement, gatherings and literacy.
Dred Scott's plea and Taney's opinion, 1857 (2.7): Scott's argument for freedom after living in free territory, and the Court's ruling denying Black citizenship.
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, chapter 6, 1855 (2.9): Includes Douglass's explanation that enslaved people's songs expressed sorrow and longing, not contentment, and the story of an enslaved woman who fought back against an overseer.
Lyrics to 'Steal Away to Jesus,' mid-1800s (2.9): A spiritual whose call to 'steal away' could mean both turning to God and escaping slavery.
Letters to Black newspapers, 1831–1841, in Call and Response (2.10): Writers debate what people of African descent should call themselves, such as 'African' or 'colored,' and what each name means.
Florida governor's letter and an account of Stono, 1739 (2.11): A Spanish governor's report to the king about Black refugees from the British colonies in Florida, and a British account that blamed Spain's offer of freedom for encouraging the Stono Rebellion.
Haiti's 1805 Constitution, Preliminary Declaration (2.12): Opens the constitution that declared Haiti a free, sovereign nation and abolished slavery forever; another article called all Haitian citizens 'Black,' making Blackness a sign of citizenship.
Frederick Douglass's lecture on Haiti, 1893 (2.12): Given at the Chicago World's Fair by the former US minister to Haiti, praising the Haitian Revolution as a blow for the freedom of all Black people.
Thomas Jefferson's letter to Rufus King, 1802 (2.13): Jefferson asks whether Black Virginians involved in revolt plots could be sent away to Sierra Leone, showing white fears of revolt after Haiti.
Maria W. Stewart, 'Why Sit Here and Die,' 1832 (2.14): A Boston speech urging free Black women and men to demand education, fair work and dignity rather than accept their limited lives.
Black Seminole and Indigenous-territory sources, 1836 and 1869 (2.17): General Thomas Jesup's 1836 diary entry on the capture of 41 Black Seminoles during the Second Seminole War, and an 1869 petition from Arkansas for freedmen's rights. Know their context: Black Seminoles' fight against removal and freed people's struggle for rights after slavery ended in Indigenous nations.
'Emigration to Mexico,' The Liberator, 1832 (2.18): A Black woman in Philadelphia urges considering emigration to Mexico, which had abolished slavery.
Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People, 1852 (2.18): Argues that Black Americans form a nation within a nation and should seek freedom and self-government by emigrating.
Frederick Douglass, 'West India Emancipation,' 1857 (2.18): Celebrates British emancipation and argues that freedom is never handed over without struggle, by words or by action.
David Walker's Appeal, 1829 (2.19): Attacks slavery, racism and colonization schemes and calls on enslaved people to claim their freedom, by force if necessary.
Henry Highland Garnet, 'An Address to the Slaves of the United States,' 1843 (2.19): Urges enslaved people to resist their enslavers rather than submit.
Harriet Tubman in The Refugee (1856) and Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886) (2.20): Benjamin Drew's book records Tubman's own words; Sarah Bradford's biography is based on interviews but puts Tubman's speech in invented dialect, so read it critically.
Mary Prince (1831) and Harriet Jacobs (1861) (2.22): Women's slave narratives describing abuse, sexual exploitation, family separation and resistance, written to win support for abolition.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 'The Colored Soldiers,' 1895 (2.23): A poem honoring Black Union soldiers and their sacrifice, against efforts to forget their role.
General Order No. 3, 1865 (2.24): Read at Galveston on June 19, 1865: announces freedom and an equality of personal and property rights between former enslavers and the formerly enslaved, while telling freed people to stay and work for wages.
The Reconstruction Amendments, 1865–1870 (3.1): The texts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Freedmen's Bureau documents and 'information wanted' ads, 1864–1883 (3.2, 3.3): The 1865 act creating the Bureau, its circulars on land and labor, a land order under Sherman's plan, and ads by freed people searching for lost relatives.
Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, 1896 (3.4): The majority opinion upholding segregated railroad cars as 'separate but equal.'
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record, chapter 1, 1895 (3.5): Shows how the excuses for lynching kept shifting and exposes the false charge of assaulting white women that was used to justify killing Black men.
Claude McKay, 'If We Must Die,' 1919 (3.6): A sonnet written during the Red Summer urging those under attack to fight back and die with dignity rather than be killed passively.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 'We Wear the Mask,' 1895 (3.7): A poem about hiding pain behind smiles in a racist society.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (3.7): Introduces the color line, the Veil and double consciousness.
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892 (3.8): Argues that Black women's voices, education and progress are essential to the progress of the whole race.
Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address, 1895 (3.8): Urges Black Southerners to build economic skills first and accept social separation for now, while asking white Southerners to employ them.
Nannie Helen Burroughs, 'How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping,' 1900 (3.8): Calls for Black Baptist women to organize their own national work in the church.
'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' 1900 (3.8): Song of faith, struggle and hope known as the Black National Anthem.
Alain Locke, The New Negro, 1925, and Langston Hughes, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,' 1926 (3.11): Locke announces a new spirit of Black self-confidence and cultural achievement; Hughes calls on Black artists to embrace their identity without shame.
Gwendolyn Bennett (1922) and Countee Cullen (1925), both titled 'Heritage' (3.13): Two poems imagining Africa: Bennett with longing and pride, Cullen asking what Africa means to someone generations removed from it.
Arturo Schomburg, 'The Negro Digs Up His Past,' 1925, and Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933 (3.15): Both argue that Black people must recover and teach their own history to counter the myth that they had none.
Anonymous letter in The Messenger, 1920 (3.16): Urges Black Southerners to leave the South for safety and opportunity in the North.
W.A. Domingo, 'Restricted West Indian Immigration and the American Negro,' 1924 (3.17): A Jamaican-born writer discusses the new immigration restrictions and what West Indian immigrants contributed to Black America.
Marcus Garvey, Address to the Second UNIA Convention, 1921 (3.18): Calls for worldwide Black unity and freedom from colonial rule in Africa.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955 (4.1): Argues that colonialism dehumanizes both the colonized and the colonizers, and that Europe accepted brutal methods as long as they were used on non-Europeans.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s interview in Ghana, 1957 (4.2): Visiting for Ghana's independence celebrations at Kwame Nkrumah's invitation, King links Africa's freedom from colonial rule to the struggle against segregation in the American South.
James G. Thompson, 'Should I Sacrifice to Live Half-American?,' 1942 (4.3): A letter to the Pittsburgh Courier asking why Black Americans should fight for a country that denied them full rights, which launched the Double V campaign.
Brown v. Board of Education opinion, 1954 (4.4): Rules that separate schools are unequal by nature and harm Black children.
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1959 (4.5): A play about the Younger family's dreams in Chicago, including their plan to buy a house in a white neighborhood that does not want them. The title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem.'
Martin Luther King Jr., 'Nonviolence and Racial Justice,' 1957 (4.6): Explains nonviolent resistance: it opposes injustice rather than people, seeks to win over opponents, accepts suffering without retaliation and is grounded in love, drawing on Christianity and Gandhi.
John Lewis, 'The Revolution Is at Hand,' 1963 (4.6): The original text of his March on Washington speech (he toned down some lines before giving it), demanding urgent action and protection from racial violence.
SNCC position paper, 'Women in the Movement,' 1964 (4.7): Argues that women did much of the movement's daily work but were shut out of decision-making, and compares sexism to racism. (The 2026 exam used it in a short-answer question.)
The New York Times on the 1964 school boycott (4.7): Reports that hundreds of thousands of Black and Puerto Rican students stayed home to protest segregated schools.
Nicolás Guillén, 'Little Rock,' 1958, and Charles Mingus, 'Original Faubus Fables,' 1960 (4.8): A Cuban poem and a jazz protest song (using call and response to mock Governor Faubus) that took the Little Rock crisis to world audiences.
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1964 (4.8): His book on the Birmingham campaign; the required excerpt describes the role of freedom songs in the movement.
Malcolm X, 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' 1964 (4.9): Urges Black Americans to use their votes and, if the government won't protect them, their right to defend themselves.
The Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program, 1966 (4.11): Lists the party's demands, including freedom, full employment, decent housing, education that teaches true history, an end to police brutality, and fair trials.
Maya Angelou, 'Still I Rise,' 1978 (4.12): A poem of defiant self-confidence and pride in the face of oppression.
Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977 (4.13): Argues that racism, sexism, class oppression and homophobia are linked, and that freeing Black women would require ending all of them.
Gwendolyn Brooks, 'We're the Only Colored People Here,' from Maud Martha, 1953 (4.14): A vignette in which Maud Martha and her husband feel out of place as the only Black couple at a downtown movie theater.
Colin Powell's Howard University commencement address, 1994 (4.15): Encourages graduates to honor those who struggled before them, make the most of their opportunities and reject hatred and intolerance.
Data sources: Brookings (2020) and Pew Research Center (2021) (4.15, 4.16): Charts on the Black middle class and wealth gap, and on Black America's growing diversity and changing religious ties. Practice reading the trend and explaining causes.
Portia K. Maultsby, 'The Evolution of African American Music,' 1980 (4.17): A scholar traces how African musical traditions shaped African American genres from spirituals to modern popular music.
Walter Mosley, 'Black to the Future,' New York Times, 1998 (4.21): Argues that science fiction lets Black writers imagine futures free of past limits.

Required images, art, music and media

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

Unit 1 images: A 1968 San Francisco State strike photo, a 1972 Hunter College course schedule and the 1975 National Council for Black Studies program; maps of climate zones, the Bantu expansion, African kingdoms and Indian Ocean trade; a gold coin of King Ezana; a Nok terracotta sculpture; the Catalan Atlas; a Mali horseman figure; Great Zimbabwe's walls; a Kongo crucifix; Queen Njinga; Queen Idia's ivory mask; and the King's Fountain painting of Lisbon.
Unit 1 religion and performance: A griot performance of the Sundiata epic, a 1970 photograph of the Malian griot Basimana with a guitar (the 2026 exam used it in a short-answer question), an Afro-Cuban performance by Grupo Abbilona, a Yoruba ceremonial wand for the orisha Shango, and Harmonia Rosales's painting Oya's Betrayal (2020), which blends Yoruba stories with Renaissance style.
Juan Garrido and the Amistad captives (2.1, 2.4): A sixteenth-century image of Garrido on a Spanish expedition, and portrait sketches of the Amistad survivors drawn during their 1839 trial, which show them as individuals rather than cargo.
The Brookes diagram (2.4): Abolitionists' cross-section of a British slave ship showing hundreds of captives packed in rows like cargo, used to shock the public.
Willie Cole, Stowage, 1997 (2.4): A large woodcut print: the outline of an ironing board, shaped like the hull in the Brookes diagram, surrounded by prints of iron soleplates that read like African masks, linking the Middle Passage to the household labor enslaved people were forced to do.
Auction broadsides, 1859 (2.5, 2.6): Posters advertising sales of enslaved people in Charleston and New Orleans, listing names, ages, skills and racial labels: evidence of people treated as property.
Unit 2 images of labor and culture: A sugar cane harvest in Antigua (1823), a lowcountry rice fanner basket (about 1863), an appliqué quilt (about 1850), a storage jar by David Drake (1858) and a gospel performance of 'Steal Away.'
'Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?' (2.8): An abolitionist image of a kneeling, chained enslaved woman, used to appeal to white women's sympathy.
Maroon, Brazil and Black Seminole images (2.15–2.17): Portraits and scenes of Jamaican maroons and a painting of people escaping slavery (The Hunted Slaves, 1862); a Rio de Janeiro festival, portraits of enslaved Africans and capoeira in Brazil; and portraits of Black Seminole leaders Abraham and Gopher John (John Horse).
Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint Louverture prints (2.12): Late-career prints from Lawrence's series on the Haitian Revolutionary leader, showing his strategy and the fight to keep freedom.
Harriet Tubman photographs and Bisa Butler's quilt (2.21): Portraits of Tubman across her life, and Butler's 2021 quilted portrait I Go to Prepare a Place for You, which draws on Black quilting traditions to link Tubman's faith and leadership.
Civil War and Juneteenth photographs (2.23, 2.24): A washerwoman for the Union Army; Charles Remond Douglass (Frederick's son) in uniform; and Juneteenth celebrations in Philadelphia, Louisville and Galveston (2019–2021).
Unit 3 photographs: Five Black members of Congress from Reconstruction; convict laborers; segregated fountains and restrooms; the burning and ruins of Greenwood in Tulsa (1921); Madam C.J. Walker products and agents; a bank clock; the Fisk Jubilee Singers; George Washington Carver's lab at Tuskegee; and HBCU and Black Greek-letter scenes.
James Van Der Zee's Harlem photographs (3.12): Studio and street portraits from 1915 to 1932, including a Garveyite family and a stylish couple, showing Black elegance, pride and everyday life.
Black performance in the 1930s–40s (3.14): Duke Ellington's 'It Don't Mean a Thing' and photographs of Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters and the cast of Cabin in the Sky.
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, 1940–41 (3.16): Sixty panels on the Great Migration. Panel 1 shows crowds at a train station with gates to Chicago, New York and St. Louis. Pair it with the Great Migration map.
Marcus Garvey photographs, 1924 (3.18): Garvey at his desk and Garvey on the streets of Harlem, images of the leader of a mass movement.
Loïs Mailou Jones, Les Fétiches (1938), and Wifredo Lam, The Jungle (1943) (4.1): Jones's painting of overlapping African masks, made in Paris under Négritude's influence; Lam's Cuban painting of mask-faced figures in a sugarcane field, reflecting on slavery and colonialism.
Diaspora and World War II photographs (4.2, 4.3): Joe Louis in Havana (1960); Maya Angelou and others petitioning outside the US embassy in Accra (1963); Major Charity Adams inspecting the 6888th; and Tuskegee flight instructors.
Gordon Parks's doll test photographs, 1947 (4.4): Kenneth Clark testing a child with Black and white dolls in Harlem, the research cited in Brown.
HOLC 'residential security' map of Philadelphia, 1937 (4.5): A map grading neighborhoods, with Black and immigrant areas colored red as 'hazardous': visual evidence of redlining.
Civil rights and Black Power photographs (4.6–4.11): Danny Lyon's photo of John Lewis and others praying outside a segregated pool in Cairo, Illinois (1962); King and Malcolm X's only meeting (1964); Muhammad Speaks newspaper sellers; Elijah Muhammad speaking; Black Panther women in Oakland; and a Panther free food program.
Music and video sources (4.8, 4.12, 4.17, 4.18, 4.21): The freedom song 'Can't Turn Me Around'; Kathleen Cleaver on natural hair (1968); Ruth Brown performing early R&B; a Soul Train line dance; and a short video on Black Panther and Afrofuturism.
Elizabeth Catlett, Negro es Bello II, 1969 (4.10): A print whose title is Spanish for 'Black Is Beautiful,' joining Black pride with Black Power imagery.
Naturally '68 photo shoot (4.12): Grandassa Models with natural hair and African Jazz-Art Society members in dashikis at the Apollo Theater, celebrating Black beauty.
Kehinde Wiley's Barack Obama and Amy Sherald's Michelle Obama, 2018 (4.15): Official portraits by two Black artists: Obama seated against a wall of leaves and flowers tied to places in his life, and Michelle Obama in a flowing patterned gown with her skin painted in gray tones.
Theater, film and dance (4.17, 4.18): A lobby card for Oscar Micheaux's The Betrayal (1948), a Soul Train photograph, the Playbill for Fences (1987) and breakdancers in New York (1984).
Sports photographs (4.19): Jockeys racing in Washington (1840); Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists on the Olympic podium (1968); and NFL players kneeling during the anthem (2017).
Science and Afrofuturism images (4.20, 4.21): Mary Jackson at work (1977); Mae Jemison in zero gravity (1992); Kadir Nelson's 2017 portrait of Henrietta Lacks; Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek; and a poster for Sun Ra's film Space Is the Place.

Big debates and recurring themes

Units 1, 2, 3, 4

Resistance takes many forms: From shipboard revolts and maroon communities to everyday slowdowns, lawsuits, boycotts, art and self-defense, resistance is the course's central thread. In essays, compare forms and their results.
Moral suasion vs. radical resistance (1830s–1840s): Persuade white Americans that slavery is a sin, or call on enslaved people to overthrow it, by force if necessary (Walker, Garnet)? Douglass himself moved toward accepting that violence might be needed.
Emigration vs. staying to claim citizenship: Cuffee and Delany looked to Africa, the Caribbean or Latin America for true freedom; Douglass and other anti-emigrationists insisted on their birthright as Americans. Both differed from the white-led American Colonization Society.
What to call ourselves: From 'African' to 'Colored,' 'Negro,' 'Afro-American,' 'Black' and 'African American,' names changed with debates about identity, belonging and pride.
Washington vs. Du Bois on uplift: Washington: industrial education, economic self-help and patience with segregation, especially in the South. Du Bois: higher education, protest and immediate civil and political rights. Both aimed at Black advancement.
Black women's place in the struggle: From Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper to Ella Baker, the SNCC women's paper and the Combahee River Collective, Black women argued that freedom movements had to address both racism and sexism, leading to womanism and intersectionality.
Integration vs. self-determination: The NAACP and King's SCLC sought integration through law and nonviolence; Garvey, the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers stressed Black-controlled institutions, pride and self-defense. Ideas overlapped and changed over time, as Malcolm X's did.
Nonviolence vs. self-defense: King saw nonviolence as both a moral principle and a strategy; others, from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Malcolm X and the Panthers, defended armed self-defense when the government would not protect Black lives.
Art and politics: Should Black art serve the freedom struggle? Hughes, the New Negro movement and the Black Arts movement called for proudly Black art; others warned against limiting artists. Freedom songs, protest jazz and hip-hop show art as activism.
Diaspora connections: Links between African Americans and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America run through the course: Kongo Catholicism, Haiti, maroons, Brazil, Garvey, Négritude and Negrismo, Ghana's independence and today's Black immigrants.
Similar movements, different visions: The New Negro, Négritude and Negrismo movements shared pride in African heritage and the push for liberation, but differed in how they saw Blackness and Africa.
Afrocentricity's supporters and critics: Supporters say centering Africa corrects a Eurocentric view of history; critics say it can flatten the variety of African and diaspora cultures and simply swap one center for another.
How big was the Underground Railroad?: Early accounts downplayed it; historians now see it as large and stress that freedom seekers themselves drove it. Because it was secret, its sources (like Bradford's biography of Tubman) must be read critically.
Was Equiano born in Africa?: Some historians point to baptism and naval records listing a South Carolina birthplace; others note that these records were made by others and defend his account. Either way the narrative is a key source on the slave trade.
African participation in the slave trade: Some African rulers and merchants sold captives, but they could not always control the trade (as Afonso I's letters show), and European demand, guns and ships drove its huge growth. Present it with that full context.
Race as a social construction: A key idea for many questions: racial categories were made by law and custom (partus, the one-drop rule, slave codes) to justify slavery and inequality, not by biology.
Wealth and opportunity across time: Slavery, Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, redlining and unequal G.I. Bill benefits each blocked Black wealth-building, helping explain today's racial wealth gap. A strong change-and-continuity theme.
Commemoration and memory: Freedom Days, Juneteenth, Black History Month, portraits of leaders and artworks like Stowage and Bisa Butler's quilt show how Black communities keep the memory of struggle and joy alive.