AP African American Studies flashcards
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- Nok culture
- An ancient society in central Nigeria known for terracotta figures and early iron smelting, flourishing roughly 900 BCE to 200 CE.
- Trans-Saharan trade
- Caravan trade routes linking West African gold and salt to North Africa and the Mediterranean, enabled by camel transport from about the 3rd century CE.
- Mansa Musa
- Ruler of the Mali Empire from about 1312 to 1337 whose lavish 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca displayed Mali's gold wealth to the wider world.
- Swahili coast city-states
- Trading ports such as Kilwa and Mombasa that connected East Africa to Arabia, Persia, and India through Indian Ocean monsoon trade.
- Great Zimbabwe
- A southern African stone-walled city that controlled regional trade in gold and ivory between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries.
- Aksum
- An Ethiopian kingdom that flourished from about the 1st to 7th century CE, minted its own coins, and adopted Christianity under King Ezana.
- Chattel slavery
- A legal system treating enslaved people as movable property that could be bought, sold, and inherited, unlike earlier forms of servitude.
- 1662 Virginia law
- A colonial statute making a child's enslaved or free status follow the mother's condition, codifying hereditary racial slavery.
- Stono Rebellion
- A 1739 uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina, the largest slave revolt in the British mainland colonies before the Revolution.
- Three-Fifths Compromise
- A 1787 constitutional provision counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for apportionment while denying them any rights.
- Haitian Revolution
- The 1791–1804 uprising led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines that created the first Black-led independent republic in the Americas.
- Nat Turner's rebellion
- An 1831 revolt in Virginia led by an enslaved preacher; it prompted stricter slave codes across the South.
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
- A federal law requiring free states to return escaped enslaved people and denying the accused a jury trial.
- Emancipation Proclamation
- An 1863 order by Abraham Lincoln declaring enslaved people in Confederate states free while exempting border states loyal to the Union.
- Reconstruction amendments
- The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery, granted citizenship and equal protection, and protected voting rights by race.
- Black Codes
- Post-Civil War southern laws restricting Black movement, labor, and legal rights, later followed by Jim Crow segregation statutes.
- Freedmen's Bureau
- A federal agency from 1865 to 1872 that provided food, schools, and legal aid to formerly enslaved people but never redistributed land permanently.
- Sharecropping
- A labor system in which tenant farmers worked land for a share of the crop, often trapped in debt through crop liens.
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- An 1896 Supreme Court decision upholding racial segregation under the doctrine of 'separate but equal.'
- Ida B. Wells
- A journalist whose 1892 and 1895 pamphlets documented lynching as economic and political terror against Black communities.
- Great Migration
- The movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities, roughly between 1916 and 1970.
- Harlem Renaissance
- A 1920s–1930s flowering of Black literature, art, and music associated with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay.
- Brown v. Board of Education
- A 1954 Supreme Court decision overturning 'separate but equal' in public schools; Thurgood Marshall argued the case for the NAACP.
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- A 1955–56 protest sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest that ended with a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation.
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Federal legislation banning discrimination in public accommodations and employment, a major achievement of the civil rights movement.
- Voting Rights Act of 1965
- A law authorizing federal oversight of elections in covered jurisdictions, passed after the Selma-to-Montgomery marches.
- Black Panther Party
- An organization founded in 1966 in Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale that combined armed self-defense with community programs.
- Kerner Commission
- A 1968 federal commission that reported the United States was becoming 'two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal.'
- March on Washington Movement
- A. Philip Randolph's 1941 campaign that pressured Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries.
- Executive Order 9981
- A 1948 order by Harry Truman desegregating the U.S. armed forces.
- SNCC
- The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded in 1960, which organized sit-ins, Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
- Million Man March
- A 1995 gathering in Washington, D.C., organized by Louis Farrakhan, emphasizing Black male responsibility, unity, and atonement.