AP African American Studies - Unit 2 Vocabulary

Key vocabulary terms from Unit 2: Freedom, Slavery, and Resistance 1503 to 1865

LADINOS

Africans familiar with Iberian culture & language who journeyed with Europeans in their earliest explorations of the Americas; among them were the first Africans in territory that became the United States

ATLANTIC CREOLES

People of African descent in “New World” Latin America. They played the important role of cultural mediators, liaisons, diplomats, missionaries, and interpreters, before the time of modern racial concepts evolved and before the predominance of chattel slavery.

LA FLORIDA

The name Spain used for an area that included Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia

CHATTEL SLAVERY

A system in which enslaved people and their descendants are classified as property and not as humans and are considered enslaved for life.

TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

Over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. Of those who survived the journey, only about 5% (approximately 388,000) came directly from Africa to what became the United States.

SLAVE NARRATIVES

Slave narratives serve as historical accounts, literary works, and political texts and are examined through interdisciplinary lenses.

DERACINATION

Being uprooted from one's social/cultural/geographic environment

COMMODIFICATION

Being treated as an item or a thing for sale, rather than human

REPURPOSED

To reuse and reinterpret something to imbue it with new meaning

MUTINY

To take action that is against accepted authority; revolt.

BENIGN INSTITUTION

The idea that race was not harmful and provided benefits for those enslaved.

SECOND MIDDLE PASSAGE

The forced relocation through the domestic slave trade from the upper South to the lower South, displacing over one million African Americans.

GANG SYSTEM

Enslaved laborers worked in groups from sunup to sundown, under the watch and discipline of an overseer as they cultivated crops like cotton, sugar, and tobacco.

TASK SYSTEM

Enslaved people worked individually until they met a daily quota, generally with less supervision. The task system was used for the cultivation of crops like rice and indigo.

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, meaning that everyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen.

PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTREM

A legal principle that defined a child’s legal status based on the status of its mother, ensuring that enslaved African American women’s children would inherit their status as property.

PHENOTYPE

Phenotype (e.g., skin color, hair texture) contributes largely to perceptions of racial identity.

HYPODESCENT

A practice known as the “one-drop rule” classified a person with any degree of African descent as part of a singular, inferior status.

SPIRITUALS

Songs enslaved people sang to articulate their hardships and their hopes. The lyrics often had double meanings and used biblical themes of redemption and deliverance.

SELF-NAMING

Reclaim and redefine individual and collective identity

ETHNONYMS

Names of ethnic groups, racial groups, and nationalities

ASYLUM

Protection/shelter

MAROONS

Afro-descendants who escaped slavery to establish free communities

MANUMISSION

Release from slavery

CAPOEIRA

A martial art developed by enslaved Africans that combines music and call-and-response singing

AUTONOMOUS SPACES

Those formerly enslaved people created autonomous (free) spaces where African-based languages and cultural practices blended and flourished, even as maroons faced illness, starvation, and the constant threat of capture.

MORAL SUASION

A persuasive technique that uses logic and moral arguments (and even implicit threats) to influence people to behave in a certain way

RADICAL RESISTANCE

Advocates embraced overthrowing slavery through direct action, including revolts and, if necessary, violence to address the daily urgency of living and dying under slavery.

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION OF 1863

That Black men had already served in every American war up to this point, though not officially

GENERAL ORDER NO. 3

This order was the first document to mention racial equality through “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

A covert network of Black and White abolitionists who provided transportation, shelter, and other resources to help enslaved people fleeing the South resettle in free territories in the U.S. North, Canada, and Mexico in the 19th century.

CARTE-DE-VISITES

A small photograph

SEXUAL ABUSE AND ENSLAVEMENT

Was legal for much of American history as the laws against rape did not apply to enslaved African American women.

13TH AMENDMENT

Wartime order declared freedom for enslaved people, permanently abolish slavery in the U.S., it freed four million African Americans, nearly a third of the South’s population, and signified a monumental first step toward achieving freedom, justice, and inclusion in the land of their birth.