AP African American Studies key terms

The global spread of African-descended peoples, cultures, and ideas through migration, trade, and forced relocation, especially the transatlantic slave trade, and the connections those communities maintained across regions.

A hereditary West African oral historian, musician, and storyteller who preserves genealogies, epics, and community memory through performance, serving as an archive of collective history in societies such as the Mande.

A long oral narrative recounting the founding of the Mali Empire by Sundiata Keita in the thirteenth century, transmitted by griots and used to teach leadership, kinship, and historical memory.

A West African state flourishing from roughly the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries whose wealth rested on gold and salt trade; its cities like Timbuktu became centers of Islamic scholarship and trans-Saharan commerce.

Fourteenth-century ruler of Mali whose pilgrimage to Mecca distributed so much gold that it affected prices in Mediterranean markets, illustrating West Africa's integration into wider trade and religious networks.

A Malian city on the Niger River that became a major hub of trans-Saharan trade and Islamic learning, home to manuscript libraries and the Sankore mosque complex.

Networks of commerce crossing the Sahara that linked West African gold, salt, and enslaved people to North Africa and the Mediterranean, spreading Islam and shaping states such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.

A Central African state centered near the Congo River that engaged in diplomacy, trade, and Christian conversion with Portugal from the late fifteenth century, later destabilized by the Atlantic slave trade.

Forms of Christian practice developed in Africa, notably in Ethiopia and Kongo, blending local belief and authority structures with Christian doctrine, sometimes predating European missions and sometimes shaped by them.

The transmission of history, law, and values through spoken performance, song, and proverb rather than writing; a primary source for reconstructing African pasts and for carrying culture into the Americas.

The forced transportation of roughly twelve million Africans to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of a triangular commerce linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas in goods and human beings.

The ocean crossing of enslaved Africans from West and Central Africa to the Americas, marked by overcrowding, disease, and mortality; survivors' shared ordeal became a foundation for diasporic identity.

A pattern of Atlantic commerce in which European manufactured goods went to Africa, enslaved Africans were carried to the Americas, and colonial commodities such as sugar and tobacco returned to Europe.

A system in which enslaved people are treated as movable property who can be bought, sold, and inherited, with no legal claim to their own labor, bodies, or children.

The period of forced adjustment after arrival in the Americas in which newly enslaved Africans were broken to labor regimes and language, a process that killed many and stripped away identities.

Colonial and state laws defining enslaved people as property and restricting their movement, assembly, literacy, and legal standing, while imposing brutal penalties meant to deter resistance.

A legal principle, adopted in seventeenth-century Virginia and elsewhere, holding that a child's enslaved or free status follows the mother's, making slavery hereditary and enabling owners to exploit enslaved women's children.

The practice of escaping slavery to form independent communities, often in mountains, swamps, or forests, where self-governing settlements preserved African-derived culture and defended themselves militarily.

Self-governing settlements of escaped enslaved people, such as Palmares in Brazil and communities in Jamaica and the Great Dismal Swamp, that resisted recapture and built autonomous social and political life.

A 1739 uprising near the Stono River in South Carolina in which enslaved people seized weapons and marched toward Spanish Florida; it led to harsher slave codes across the colonies.

An 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, led by an enslaved preacher; its suppression and the retaliation that followed intensified proslavery laws and sharpened national debate over slavery.

The organized movement to end slavery, ranging from gradual emancipation and colonization schemes to immediate abolition, advanced by Black and white activists through print, petition, and resistance.

A loose network of routes, safe houses, and helpers that assisted enslaved people escaping to free states, Canada, and Mexico, relying on secrecy and often on free Black communities.

An escaped enslaved woman who returned repeatedly to guide others to freedom along the Underground Railroad and later served the Union as a scout and spy during the Civil War.

A formerly enslaved writer and orator whose autobiography and newspapers made him a leading voice for abolition, Black self-determination, and later women's suffrage in the nineteenth century.

An autobiographical account by a formerly enslaved person, used to expose slavery's cruelty and argue for abolition; a foundational genre of African American literature.

President Lincoln's 1863 order declaring enslaved people in rebelling Confederate states free, reframing the Civil War as a war against slavery and opening the Union army to Black soldiers.

The period after the Civil War, roughly 1865 to 1877, when federal policy aimed to rebuild the South, extend citizenship, and protect freedpeople's rights, before being curtailed by political compromise.

The 1865 constitutional amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, a loophole later exploited through convict leasing and peonage.

The 1868 amendment granting citizenship and equal protection of the laws, later the constitutional basis for civil rights litigation challenging segregation and discriminatory state action.

The 1870 amendment prohibiting denial of the vote based on race, color, or prior servitude, though it left room for poll taxes, literacy tests, and other disenfranchising measures.

A federal agency established in 1865 to provide relief, education, and legal aid to formerly enslaved people, helping found schools and settle labor disputes before being dismantled.

A historically Black college or university founded to educate African Americans, especially when segregation barred them from other institutions; examples include Howard, Fisk, and Tuskegee.

A school founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington in Alabama emphasizing industrial and agricultural training, representing one side of early debates over Black education and strategy.

An educator and leader who advocated vocational training and gradual self-improvement while accommodating segregation, a strategy criticized by those demanding immediate political and civil rights.

An 1895 speech by Booker T. Washington urging Black economic advancement through labor and accommodation on social and political equality, which drew sharp criticism from civil rights advocates.

A sociologist, writer, and activist who co-founded the NAACP and argued for political rights and higher education for a 'talented tenth,' introducing concepts such as double consciousness.

Du Bois's idea that Black Americans live with a divided awareness, seeing themselves both through their own eyes and through the lens of a racist society that dehumanizes them.

A system of state and local laws and customs enforcing racial segregation and Black subordination in the South from the late nineteenth century into the 1960s.

An 1896 Supreme Court decision upholding racial segregation under the 'separate but equal' doctrine, legitimizing Jim Crow until it was overturned in 1954.

The large-scale movement of African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities across the twentieth century, reshaping Black life, politics, and culture.

A flowering of Black literature, music, and visual art centered in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated African American culture and challenged racist stereotypes.

A philosopher and editor whose 1925 anthology 'The New Negro' framed the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural and political awakening, promoting Black artistic achievement as a path to social change.

The 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, overturning 'separate but equal' and energizing the modern civil rights movement.

The mid-twentieth-century struggle, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, to end legal segregation and secure voting and citizenship rights for African Americans through protest, litigation, and organizing.

A 1955–1956 protest in Alabama in which Black residents refused to ride segregated buses for over a year, resulting in a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation and elevating Martin Luther King Jr.

A Baptist minister and leader of nonviolent direct action who championed integration and civil rights, shaping federal legislation before his 1968 assassination.

A late-1960s movement emphasizing Black self-determination, racial pride, independent institutions, and community control, associated with figures like Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panther Party.

A Black political organization founded in 1966 in Oakland that combined armed self-defense with community programs such as free breakfasts and health clinics, while facing intense government surveillance.

Federal legislation that outlawed discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests and provided enforcement mechanisms, dramatically increasing Black voter registration in the South.

The practice of denying mortgages, insurance, and investment to neighborhoods based on race, which entrenched residential segregation and the racial wealth gap in northern and western cities.