United Grade 11 AP African American Studies
Chapters: 4
1. Origins of the African Diaspora
What Is African American Studies? · The African Continent: A Varied Landscape · Population Growth and Ethnolinguistic Diversity · Africa's Ancient Societies · The Sudanic Empires: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai · Learning Traditions · Indigenous Cosmologies and Religious Syncretism · Culture and Trade in Southern and East Africa · West Central Africa: The Kingdom of Kongo · Kinship and Political Leadership · Global Africans
- Early African History: Lands, Kingdoms, Trade and Ideas (to c. 1600) – Africa is a huge continent of deserts, savannas and rainforests with over 2000 languages. Great societies grew there: Kemet and Kush on the Nile, Aksum in the Horn, Nok iron-workers, the gold-and-salt empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, Swahili trading cities, Great Zimbabwe and the Kingdom of Kongo. Kinship, oral and written learning, and blended beliefs shaped life, and Africans travelled the world long before the Atlantic slave trade.
2. Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance
African Explorers in the Americas · Departure Zones in Africa and the Slave Trade to the United States · Capture and the Impact of the Slave Trade on West African Societies · African Resistance on Slave Ships and the Antislavery Movement · Slave Auctions and the Domestic Slave Trade · Labor, Culture, and Economy · Slavery and American Law: Slave Codes and Landmark Cases · The Social Construction of Race and the Reproduction of Status · Creating African American Culture · Black Pride, Identity, and the Question of Naming · The Stono Rebellion and Fort Mose · Legacies of the Haitian Revolution · Resistance and Revolts in the United States · Black Organizing in the North: Freedom, Women's Rights, and Education · Maroon Societies and Autonomous Black Communities · Diasporic Connections: Slavery and Freedom in Brazil · African Americans in Indigenous Territory · Debates About Emigration, Colonization, and Belonging in America · Black Political Thought: Radical Resistance · Race to the Promised Land: Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad · Legacies of Resistance in African American Art and Photography · Gender and Resistance in Slave Narratives · The Civil War and Black Communities · Freedom Days: Commemorating the Ongoing Struggle for Freedom
- The Atlantic Slave Trade, Resistance and the Abolition of Slavery – From about 1500 to the 1860s, European traders forced around 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic to work without pay on plantations in the Americas. This trade linked Europe, Africa and the Americas in a 'triangular trade'. Laws called slave codes treated enslaved people as property. Enslaved people resisted in many ways, from daily acts to escape, free 'maroon' communities and revolts such as the Haitian Revolution. A long abolition movement ended the trade and then slavery itself, country by country, between 1794 and 1888. Its legacies, including racism and inequality, are still felt today.
3. The Practice of Freedom
The Reconstruction Amendments · Social Life: Reuniting Black Families and the Freedmen's Bureau · Black Codes, Land, and Labor · The Defeat of Reconstruction · Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow Laws · White Supremacist Violence and the Red Summer · The Color Line and Double Consciousness in American Society · Lifting as We Climb: Uplift Ideologies and Black Women's Rights and Leadership · Black Organizations and Institutions · HBCUs, Black Greek Letter Organizations, and Black Education · The New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance · Photography and Social Change · Envisioning Africa in Harlem Renaissance Poetry · Symphony in Black: Black Performance in Music, Theater, and Film · Black History Education and African American Studies · The Great Migration · Afro-Caribbean Migration · The Universal Negro Improvement Association
- The American Civil War and Reconstruction (1845–1877) – Between 1845 and 1877 the United States grew west, split over slavery, fought a civil war and then tried to rebuild. The North had factories and free labour; the South grew cotton with about 4 million enslaved people. New western land raised one question again and again: would new states allow slavery? Compromises (1820, 1850) failed, and after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, 11 Southern states left the Union. The war (1861–65) killed about 620,000 soldiers. The North won with more people, factories and railways, and slavery was ended by the 13th Amendment. Reconstruction (1865–77) gave citizenship and the vote to Black men, but when federal troops left in 1877, many of these rights were taken away for almost a century.
4. Movements and Debates
The Négritude and Negrismo Movements · Anticolonialism and Black Political Thought · African Americans and the Second World War: The Double V Campaign and the G.I. Bill · Discrimination, Segregation, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement · Redlining and Housing Discrimination · Major Civil Rights Organizations · Black Women's Leadership and Grassroots Organizing in the Civil Rights Movement · The Arts, Music, and Politics of Freedom · Black Religious Nationalism and the Black Power Movement · The Black Arts Movement · The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense · Black Is Beautiful and Afrocentricity · The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality · Interlocking Systems of Oppression · Economic Growth and Black Political Representation · Demographic and Religious Diversity in Contemporary Black Communities · The Evolution of African American Music: From Spirituals to Hip-Hop · Black Life in Theater, TV, and Film · African Americans and Sports · Science, Medicine, and Technology in Black Communities · Black Studies, Black Futures, and Afrofuturism
- The Civil Rights Movement: How Ordinary People Changed Unfair Laws – The Civil Rights Movement (about 1954–1968) was a mass campaign by Black Americans and their allies to end legal segregation and discrimination in the United States. After slavery ended, 'Jim Crow' laws kept Black people in separate and worse schools, seats and services and blocked them from voting. Using court cases, boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides and marches, and mostly nonviolent methods inspired partly by Gandhi, groups such as the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC and CORE won the Brown decision (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Fair Housing Act (1968). Later Black Power, Black arts and Black feminist movements, and links with anticolonial struggles, carried the fight further. Inequality in housing, wealth and justice is still debated today.