Unit 2 Vocabulary: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance

Vocabulary flashcards based on Unit 2 lecture notes on Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance.

Ladinos

free or enslaved Africans who explored early America with Europeans and were often part of a generation of Atlantic creoles

Atlantic creoles

Africans who worked as a link between Europeans and Natives

Chattel slavery

Slavery where a person is deemed property and that passes down generation to generation.

Conquistadors

African explorers who europeans conquer America in hopes of gaining their freedom

Juan Garrido

A free man, who became the first known African to arrive in North America in what is today Florida.

Estevanico

An enslaved African healer who was forced to work as a translator and explorer in Texas.

Departure zones

all along the western coast of Africa, is where the slave ships departed from.

Slave coast

West African coast river volta to the lagos channel.

The Middle Passage

The second part of the journey in the Trans-atlantic slave trade across the atlantic ocean.

The transatlantic slave trade

The triangle of trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, which brought over 12 million enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.

Slave narratives

Enslaved people’s experience told through poetry and other forms of art.

Slave ship diagram

charts that show the arrangement of enslaved people in ships.

Abolitionists

People who called for the end of slavery.

Commodification

When people’s values are reduced to less than human and are viewed as tools instead of people.

Deracination

The removal of someone from their culture.

Sengbe Pieh

A captive who led a major revolt on one of the ships bringing over slaves.

La Amistad

The boat that was taken over by Sengbe Pieh

Mende captives

enslaved people take from Sierra Leone

Slave auction

A marketplace where enslaved people were sold off to the highest bidder.

Cash crop

Crops grown solely for the purpose of profiting them.

Cotton gin

A machine that increased the need for slave labor on cotton farms.

Second Middle Passage

Massive forced migration of enslaved people from upper south to lower south

Gang system

System where enslaved people worked in groups from sunrise to sunset and were watched by an overseer.

Work songs

Songs enslaved people sung to keep up the pace when working so as to avoid punishment.

Task system

enslaved people worked individually until their given task was done which allowed for a little more freedom.

Gullah creole

language created by slaves under a task system as a way to keep their linguistic practices.

Racial nomenclature

a system that marks people based on their racial profile.

Mulatto

a person with one black and one white parent

Griffe

a person who was ¾ black and ¼ indigenous

Rice fanner basket

a basket that shows how agricultural practices from Africa made it to the Americas thanks to the efforts of those enslaved.

Slave codes

designed to keep slavery based on race, make it inheritable, and a lifelong condition.

Code Noir

Limited and restricted the freedoms and movements of enslaved people in French colonies.

Stono Rebellion

The largest uprising of enslaved people in the British colonies which led to the intense update of the south carolina slave codes.

South Carolina’s 1740 slave code

Codes that prohibited enslaved people from learning to read, drumming, gathering, rebelling, and moving from one town/plantation to another without permission from the owner.

Dred Scott v. Sanford

A landmark ruling in the supreme court that said black people were not citizens of the United States and would never be considered one.

Partus sequitur ventrem

a law that decided a child’s status on whether or not they would be considered a slave, was to be based on the condition of the mother.

Racial taxonomy

a system of categorizing people based on physical traits and ancestry.

Phenotype

observable traits, like skin color and hair texture

Hypodescent

categorizing biracial people as falling into the more minority group

One-drop rule

Made it so that anybody with any percentage of african ancestry was to be considered inferior