AP African American Studies - Unit 2: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, historical figures, legal doctrines, and cultural milestones of AP African American Studies Unit 2.

Diaspora

The dispersion or spread of a people away from their original homeland.

African Diaspora

The communities of African people and their descendants dispersed across the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere through both voluntary migration and forced movements such as the transatlantic slave trade.

Enslaved Person (vs. Slave)

A terminology choice that recognizes an individual's humanity and personhood, emphasizing that enslavement was an imposed legal and social condition rather than their fundamental identity.

Louis Agassiz

A Swiss-born Harvard naturalist who commissioned 1850 daguerreotypes of enslaved individuals (including Renty and Delia) to promote racist pseudoscience and the discredited theory of polygenism (that human races were separately created species).

Tailoring Freedom

A 2021–2022 art project by Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber that uses a signature staple gun technique to 'clothe' nineteenth-century photographs of stripped enslaved subjects in metallic garment-armor to restore dignity and confront historical trauma.

Ladinos

Free and enslaved Africans familiar with Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) culture and languages who accompanied European expeditions to the Americas in the sixteenth century, representing the earliest Africans in what became the United States.

Atlantic Creoles

Africans who served as cultural and commercial intermediaries prior to the dominance of chattel slavery, whose multilingual fluency and familiarity with diverse customs granted them a measure of social mobility.

Juan Garrido

A free African conquistador born in the Kingdom of Kongo who moved to Lisbon and became the first known African to arrive in North America when he took part in a 1513 Spanish expedition to Florida.

Estevanico (Esteban)

An enslaved African healer and explorer from Morocco who served as an interpreter and scout across Texas and the American Southwest during Spanish expeditions beginning in 1528.

Charleston, South Carolina

The primary seaport and hub of the United States slave trade, through which approximately 48 percent of all captive Africans transported directly to the U.S. mainland entered the country.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Departure Zones

Nine contemporary African regions from which mainland North America primarily drew captives: Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique (with Senegambia and Angola accounting for nearly half).

Slave Factories

Fortified European commercial compounds and coastal holding pens where kidnapped Africans were imprisoned in unsanitary dungeons, inspected, and held for weeks or months prior to ship embarkation.

The Door of No Return

The fortified coastal portal at Ghana's Cape Coast Castle through which captive Africans boarded slave ships, symbolizing irreversible separation from their ancestral homeland.

Middle Passage

The second leg of the triangular trade crossing the Atlantic Ocean; a voyage lasting up to three months marked by trauma, disease, extreme confinement, and an estimated 15 percent mortality rate.

Final Passage

The third phase of the transatlantic journey, in which surviving captives were quarantined, sold at American ports, and transported domestically to distant plantations and sites of forced labor.

Slave Narratives

A foundational literary and political genre composed by formerly enslaved people (such as Olaudah Equiano) designed to document atrocities, demonstrate Black humanity, and advance the cause of abolition.

Phillis Wheatley

An eighteenth-century author brought to Boston from West Africa who became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry, known for works such as 'On Being Brought from Africa to America.'

Deracination

The act of uprooting or forcibly severing a person from their homeland, culture, community, or ancestral roots.

Amistad Revolt (1839)

A successful revolt led by Sengbe Pieh aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad, which culminated in an 1841 U.S. Supreme Court decision granting the Mende captives their freedom.

Sengbe Pieh

A Mende captive from Sierra Leone who organized and led the 1839 rebellion aboard the slave ship La Amistad.

Creole Revolt (1841)

A maritime uprising led by Madison Washington aboard the domestic slave brig Creole, which successfully diverted the vessel to Nassau in the British Bahamas, securing freedom for approximately 128 to 130 people.

Brookes Slave Ship Diagram

An influential eighteenth-century visual document produced and circulated by British abolitionists depicting the severe, tightly packed arrangement of captive bodies aboard a slave vessel.

Iconography

The study and interpretation of visual images, symbols, and artistic motifs within cultural, historical, or religious contexts.

Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1808)

Federal legislation enacted in 1808 banning the international importation of enslaved people into the United States, which shifted plantation labor growth to domestic reproduction and internal trafficking.

Cotton Gin

A mechanical device invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 that rapidly separated cotton fiber from seeds, driving exponential expansion of cotton agriculture and enslaved labor across the Deep South.

Second Middle Passage

The forced domestic migration of over one million enslaved African Americans marched from the Upper South to the cotton-producing Lower South during the nineteenth-century cotton boom.

Solomon Northup

A free Black musician from New York who was kidnapped in 1841, enslaved in Louisiana for twelve years, and later published the abolitionist narrative 'Twelve Years a Slave.'

Gang System

A plantation labor regime common on cotton, sugar, and tobacco estates where groups of enslaved workers performed continuous field labor from sunrise to sunset under the direct supervision and discipline of an overseer.

Task System

A labor regime common on Carolina and Georgia rice and indigo plantations where enslaved individuals were assigned defined daily quotas, allowing greater pacing flexibility and personal time once completed.

Work Songs

Rhythmic, syncopated songs created by enslaved field laborers to coordinate pacing, relieve monotony, express spiritual endurance, and maintain communal solidarity.

Gullah Geechee

An African American population inhabiting the coastal Sea Islands and lowcountry of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida that preserved extensive African linguistic, craft, and spiritual traditions due to geographic isolation and the task system.

Jumping the Broom

An African American wedding ceremony adopted by enslaved couples to symbolize their union, domestic commitment, and mutual bond in the absence of legal marriage recognition.

Harriet Powers

A Georgia quiltmaker born into slavery whose appliquéd textile works (including her famous Bible Quilt) merged biblical imagery, celestial events, and West African textile aesthetics.

David Drake ('Dave')

An enslaved artisan and poet in the Edgefield District of South Carolina who created large alkaline-glazed stoneware vessels inscribed with his signature, dates, and original rhyming poetry.

Spirituals

Religious folk melodies (also called sorrow songs and jubilees) composed by enslaved people that integrated African polyrhythms with Christian scriptures, frequently containing double meanings to encode escape instructions.

Colored Conventions

A series of political assemblies held across the United States and Canada beginning in the 1830s where Black delegates organized to debate identity, campaign for civil rights, and strategize against slavery.

Social Construction of Race

The concept that racial classifications are invented by societies rather than rooted in discrete biological or genetic divisions, developed historically to rationalize labor exploitation and social stratification.

Hypodescent ('One-Drop Rule')

A legal and social principle in the United States that assigned any person with even trace amounts of African ancestry to the subordinate Black racial category.

Partus Sequitur Ventrem

A 1662 Virginia colonial statute dictating that an infant's legal status (free or enslaved) strictly followed the legal status of the mother, codifying hereditary chattel status and commodifying Black women's reproduction.

South Carolina Slave Code of 1740 (Negro Act of 1740)

A draconian legal statute enacted following the 1739 Stono Rebellion that prohibited enslaved people from assembling, reading, writing, moving without passes, playing drums, or defending themselves against white individuals.

Fort Mose

A fortified settlement established near St. Augustine, Spanish Florida, in 1738; it was the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the continental United States.

Francisco Menéndez

An African-born Senegambian freedom fighter who escaped English enslavement, led the Black militia in Spanish Florida, and served as the military and community leader of Fort Mose.

Stono Rebellion (1739)

A major South Carolina uprising led by an enslaved Angolan man named Jemmy, wherein roughly 100 insurgents destroyed plantations and marched toward sanctuary in Spanish Florida before being intercepted.

German Coast Uprising (Louisiana Revolt of 1811)

The largest slave revolt on United States soil, led by Charles Deslondes, in which up to 500 enslaved people near New Orleans armed themselves and marched under banners chanting 'Freedom or Death.'

Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)

A successful anti-colonial and anti-slavery insurrection in Saint-Domingue that defeated French colonial rule, abolished slavery, and created the world's first independent Black republic.

Maroons

Self-emancipated individuals who escaped chattel bondage and established independent, self-governing settlements in secluded regions like swamps, forests, and mountain ranges.

Great Dismal Swamp Maroon Communities

Autonomous communities created by self-emancipated Black people in the isolated wetlands along the Virginia and North Carolina border between 1630 and 1865.

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church

The first independent Black denomination in the United States, founded in Philadelphia in 1816 by Richard Allen following racial segregation and mistreatment within white Methodist congregations.

Maria W. Stewart

A pioneering nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights lecturer who became the first Black American woman to publish a political manifesto and deliver public political lectures.