AP African American Studies Exam Review

Unit 1: Origins of the African Diaspora

• What is African American Studies?

  • Interdisciplinary field: Includes history, art, culture, literature, etc.

  • Evolved over time, becoming an official field.

  • Examines Africa's history and its relationship with the African diaspora-The term diaspora refers to the dispersion or spread of people from their

  • Traces connections between Africa, African Americans, and Afro-Latinos.

  • Emerged from the Black Power movement on campuses in the 1960s (Black Campus Movement, 1965-1972).

  • Dispels misconceptions of early Africa as undocumented or unknowable.

• Africa's History and Diversity

  • Geography:

    • Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean (bordering northern and eastern coasts).

    • Atlantic Ocean (bordering the western coast).

    • Geographical zones: tropical rainforest (Congo region), Sahara Desert (largest desert), Sahel, grasslands, Mediterranean (northern and southern tips).

    • Nile River Valley and other rivers play a significant role.

  • Climate dictated animal life, human migration, and trade routes.

• Bantu Migration

  • Ethnolinguistic characteristics of the Bantu people.

  • Migration throughout South Africa, West Central Africa, and East Africa.

  • Timeline: 3000 BC to 1200 CE.

  • Reasons for movement: technology, growth, overpopulation, agriculture.

  • Dispersal of genetic qualities.

• Early African Kingdoms

  • Four main kingdoms: Egypt, Nubia, Aksum, and Nok culture.

  • Egypt and Nubia:

    • Nile River Valley civilizations.

    • Interacted and were at war with each other.

    • Egypt is located in Africa.

  • Aksum:

    • Located in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea.

    • First country to adopt Orthodox Christianity.

  • Nok Culture:

    • Terracotta sculptures showcase advanced society.

  • Significance:

    • Refuting misconceptions about African contributions.

    • European colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade reinforced misconceptions to justify treatment.

• Sudanic Empires (West Africa)

  • Ghana:

    • Center of trade with gold.

  • Mali:

    • Mansa Musa and Timbuktu: center of trade and learning.

    • Books were currency; traded gold and salt.

    • Mansa Musa's Hajj to Mecca.

  • Songhai:

    • Shift from Trans-Saharan to Atlantic trade.

    • The griots, Epic of Sundiata.

  • Growth of Islam plays a significant role.

  • The majority of enslaved Africans transported to North America came from these West African societies.

• Great Zimbabwe

  • Stone architecture, military and trade hub, part of the Swahili Coast trade.

  • Africans traded across the Indian Ocean with India and China.

  • Gold, ivory, and cattle were main commodities.

  • Symbolic significance for Africans.

• Kingdom of the Congo

  • First large African civilization to convert to Christianity.

  • King and King Zynga, letter to the King of Portugal, addressing the poor trade relationship that was agreed upon.

  • Portuguese sought ivory, salt, copper, textiles, and human labor.

  • Religious syncretism: blending Catholicism with African belief systems.

• West African Leadership: Role of Women

  • Queens, matriarchs, spiritual leaders, political advisors, traders, educators.

  • Queen Jinga and Zinga, Queen Idia.

  • Held significant leadership positions, unlike most European societies.

• Rise of Slavery

  • Slavery begins in Portugal in the late fifteenth century between West Africa and Portugal.

  • Portugal is geographically close to West Africa.

  • African kingdoms grew wealthy, some participating in the slave trade, thinking it was similar to African systems.

  • Portugal and Spain colonized the Atlantic Islands, Cabo Verde and Sao Tome, establishing plantations.

  • Cash crops: cotton, indigo, and sugar.

  • Africans became the main source of labor.

  • By 1500, approximately 50,000 Africans had been taken to work on islands or in Europe.

• Main Takeaways:

  • A major element of African American Studies challenges misconceptions about Africa.

  • Africa was home to advanced societies and played an important role on the global stage.

  • European expansion and global demand for goods produced by enslaved labor led to the rise of slavery.

Unit 2: The Transatlantic Slave Trade

• Not all African people who went to North and South America were enslaved.

  • Some Africans were conquistadors and part of Spanish conquests.

    • This group was known as Ladinos (e.g., Juan Garrido).

• The Transatlantic Slave Trade

  • Initial Capture/Journey to the Coast:

    • Captives were held on the coast in barracoons and castles (e.g., Cape Coast Castle, Elmina Castle) before transport.

  • Middle Passage (transport across the Atlantic):

    • Elada Equiano's narrative is an important source of information about the Middle Passage journey.

  • Door of No Return: Associated with transport onto ships across the Atlantic.

  • Commodification: Enslaved and captive Africans were treated as objects with monetary value.

• Impact of Transatlantic Slave Trade

  • Diversity of Black communities across the diaspora.

  • Economic turmoil, political instability, and human impact on African societies.

• Resistance During Transatlantic Slave Trade

  • Forms of resistance:

    • Slave narratives (Elada Equiano).

    • Slave ship diagrams (e.g., diagram of the slave ship Brooks).

    • Literature and poetry (e.g., Phyllis Wheatley).

    • Physical resistance: hunger strikes, jumping overboard, revolting.

    • Amistad case: Successfully argued for freedom and return to Africa.

  • Backlash to resistance:

    • Guns, nets, instruments for force-feeding, and other forms of torture were used to prevent resistance.

• Experiences of the Enslaved in the Americas

  • Growth of slavery due to demand for cash crops:

    • Sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton.

    • Economic dependence on cash crops: Interdependence of North and South in The United States.

  • Slave Codes: Laws restricting the movement, communication, literacy, and basic human rights of enslaved people.

    • Partis Secutor Ventrum: Status of a child (free or enslaved) was derived from their mother.

  • Cotton Gin: Led to growth of cotton industry.

  • Domestic Slave Trade:

    • Forcible transport of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South (Second Middle Passage).

    • Auctioning of enslaved people.

  • Enslaved labor was not just plantation labor; varied depending on location (e.g., domestic servants, trade skills).

  • Indian Removal: Removal of the five civilized tribes facilitated the expansion of slavery.

  • Codification of hereditary slavery: Slavery based on family line.

  • Racial classifications:

    • Hypodescent/one-drop rule: If you are part Black, then you are Black, with consequences for status and rights.

  • Family separation: Due to domestic slave trade and slave auctions.

  • Wealth gap: Generations of people stuck in slavery, preventing economic independence.

  • Music with African influence:

    • Development of the banjo.

    • Techniques: call and response, ring shout, clapping, improvisation.

    • Biblical references due to Christian conversion.

  • Fugitive Slave Act: Stricter version in 1850, impacting resistance efforts.

    • Commissioners earned more money if they found the accused to be an escaped enslaved person.

• Resistance to Enslavement

  • Political, intellectual, and cultural forms of resistance:

    • Political, intellectual, and cultural resistance included lawsuits like Elizabeth Key's, the Dred Scott decision, the Abolitionist movement (Frederick Douglass), maintaining African culture (music, art, dance, spirituals), slave narratives, immigration (Martin Delaney), a free black community, Colored Conventions, intersectionality, and photography.

    • Dred Scott decision (arguing for freedom based on having been taken to free territories).

    • Abolitionist movement (e.g., Frederick Douglass).

    • Maintenance of African culture: Music, art, dance, spirituals.

    • Slave narratives (e.g., Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs).

    • Immigration: Martin Delaney.

    • Active free black community.

    • Colored Conventions: Discussions about identity and approach to advancement.

    • Intersectionality: Unique experiences of Black women (e.g., Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs).

    • Photography: Portrayal of African Americans as sophisticated.

  • Physical resistance:

    • Daily forms: breaking tools, stealing, slowing down work.

    • Fighting enslavers and overseers.

    • Self-liberation: death, escape via the Underground Railroad and Maroon societies.

    • Radical resistance and rebellions: Stoner Rebellion, Haitian Revolution, Louisiana Slave Revolt, Nat Turner's Rebellion.

    • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnett (associated with radical resistance).

    • Harriet Tubman: Combahee River Raid.

• How Slavery Ends

  • Abolitionist movement and Civil War.

  • Enslaved people escaping to Union lines.

  • Confiscation Acts: Legalized taking enslaved people as contraband of war.

  • African Americans helping the Union Army: Cooks, nurses, spies, and soldiers.

  • Backlash in the North: Draft riots.

  • Emancipation Proclamation (issued in September 1862, official 01/01/1863): Freed enslaved people in states in rebellion.

    • Opened up military service for African American men (200,000 enlisted).

    • Did not immediately free enslaved people in the Confederacy; liberation often dependent on the Union Army.

    • Juneteenth: Celebration of learning about emancipation in Galveston, Texas.

  • Slavery officially abolished by the thirteenth amendment in December of 1865.

    • Condition for Confederate states to reenter the Union: Abolish slavery and ratify the thirteenth amendment.

• Big Takeaways from Unit 2:

  • Enslavement dehumanized and commodified African Americans.

  • Not all African Americans were enslaved or worked on plantations; varied skills and lives.

  • African Americans utilized a variety of direct and indirect forms of resistance.

  • Abolition of slavery largely due to the efforts of African Americans themselves.

Unit 3: The Practice of Freedom

• Reconstruction

  • Potential and successes:

    • Abolition of slavery with the thirteenth amendment.

    • African Americans granted citizenship with the fourteenth Amendment.

      • Establishment of birthright citizenship.

      • Equal protection under the law.

    • Black men granted the right to vote by the fifteenth amendment in 1870.

      • Black men in the South got the right to vote before the fifteenth amendment.

    • Black office holders at local, state, and federal levels.

    • Enslaved people reunifying with loved ones.

    • Legal marriages.

    • Changing surnames.

    • Freedmen's Bureau helping with schools.

    • Many people move to free states.

  • Low Points of Reconstruction

    • Enactment of Black Codes: Restrictions on African Americans' movement, communication, etc.

    • Racial violence: Lynching.

    • Disenfranchisement: Obstacles to voting (poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses) and intimidation.

    • Land distribution: Formerly enslaved people wanted land, but Andrew Johnson canceled that and returned land to former slave owners.

    • Sharecropping/crop lien system: African Americans got stuck in debt.(Sharecropping is a system where African Americans got stuck in debt during Reconstruction because they had to give a share of their crops to landowners, often leading to a cycle of poverty and dependence.

    • Convict Leasing system: Arrested for ticky tack fouls, violating black codes, etc. and forced to work off their debt, real beginnings of the prison industrial complex with a loophole from the 13th Amendment.

• Nadir of Race Relations (late 19th - mid 20th century)

  • Characterized by segregation and racial violence.

    • Jim Crow laws: De jure segregation.

    • Plessy versus Ferguson: Separate but equal.

    • Southern lynch laws justified racial violence and media fueled stereotypes of black criminality.

  • Explosion of Violence after World War I.

    • Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

  • Continued Black Resistance

    • Ida B. Wells exposing lynching through Anti-lynching investigations.

    • Resistance through literature, poetry, music

  • Racial Uplift: Various Ideas for How African Americans Could Advance

    • Education (Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois).

    • Women's club movement and women's suffrage efforts (Anna Julia Cooper - education for women)..

    • Carter G. Woodson emphasizing the study of Black history.

    • Growth of African American studies/African American history.

    • HBCUs and black fraternities and sororities the National Pan Hellenic Council aka the Divine Nine.

    • Artistic expression with the New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance and Great Migration.

    • Back to Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey.

    • Back Nationalism and Pan-Africanism

    • Political and religious institutions like Black owned business, Black Press, AME Church, NAACP and the UNIA.

• Great Migration

  • Voluntary migration of African Americans out of the South to the North, Midwest, and Western United States.

    • Reasons: Racial violence and Jim Crow laws, job opportunities in factories, and crop failures in the South.

  • Effects of Great Migration

    • Diverse African American communities in cities.

    • Black culture in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro, the expression of art through the black aesthetic.

    • Culture brought from people in all African American communities.

    • Racial tensions in cities due to urbanization.

• Big Takeaways from Unit Three:

  • Freedom brings success for African Americans politically and economically.

  • Backlash undermines a lot of changes through racial violence and prison lease system and other various forms of oppression, a second founding of discrimination against black people.

  • African Americans mobilize, organize, and become self aware during this time.

Unit 4: Movements and Debates

• Anticolonial Movements and Early Black Freedom Movement

  • Negritude (French Caribbean) and Negrismo (Latin America): Embracing black culture.

  • Connecting to the New Negro Movement.

  • Protesting through writing, art, expressive culture, and celebration.

  • Cultural pride and political activism.

• Segregation and Discrimination

  • Persisted in The United States after Civil Rights Act of 1875 and Reconstruction amendments.

  • De facto segregation remained prevalent even after Brown versus Board of Education.

  • White families moved to the suburbs (development of suburban living).

  • African Americans created jitneys for transportation.

  • GI Bill of 1944: States distributed benefits like health, housing, and business loans, often denying them to African Americans in Jim Crow and Northern states.

  • Housing discrimination (redlining): Cities drew lines on maps, making it illegal for black people to live across those lines.

  • Denial of upward mobility, access to public amenities, schools, and healthcare.

• The Modern Civil Rights Movement

  • Key Figures:

    • Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph (The Big Six).
      Organizations: NAACP (founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), Urban League.

  • Faith and Traditions: Important for Music.

    • Adaptation of hymns, spirituals, gospel songs, labor union songs.

    • Churches and Faith based organizations.

  • Nonviolent Direct Action:

    • Freedom rides, marches, protests, boycotts, sit-ins.

    • Bus Boycott (1955).

    • Little Rock Crisis (1957).

    • March on Washington (1963).

    • Civil Rights Act of (1964).

    • Selma March (1965) and Voting Rights Act.

    • Fair Housing Act (1968).

    • Poets in Negrismo helped connect countries during this time.

• Diasporic Solidarity

  • Countries against Colonies through the Negritude and Negrismo movment.

  • Civil Rights Era's key and growing organizations.

• Black Power

  • Self-determination, cultural pride, and self-defense.

  • Malcolm X: Promoted black pride (Nation of Islam).

  • Black Panther Party (founded in 1966):

    • 10-point program: Fair housing, education, jobs, healthcare, prison reform.

    • Free breakfast, healthcare, and clothing programs (survival programs).

    • Embraced Second Amendment rights.

    • Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown.

• Black Women's Roles in the Movement

  • Significant, though often not in leadership roles.

  • Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Josephine Baker.

  • Writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Mari Evans explored intersectionality.

• Diversity Within Black Communities

  • The growing Black middle class from successes that African Americans fought for.

  • The right to access jobs, economy, political gains, urbanization, equal access and opportunity.

  • Black People can access, resources, fair housing, civil rights, and voting rights acts.

Black Political Gains

    *     Many gains directly from Civil war with Black Office holders. 
    *    Blacks got office positions again after the Voting Rights Act (1965)
    *   Number of Black elected officials grew from 1,500 to 9,000 (1970-2006).
    *   Shirley Chisholm becomes the first Black woman to ever run for president of the United States of any ethnicity

Afrofuturism

• Identity, culture, and connection: Evolution of Black Music:
  * From Negro spirituals to ragtime, blues, folk songs, jazz, R&B, soul music, hip hop, and funk.
  * Elements: improv, call and response, syncopation, dance.

• African Americans in STEM:
  Fields: agriculture, technology, medicine, science, and engineering.
  * Daniel Hale Williams helped perform first open heart surgery Dr Charles Drew did the first Blood Bank.
  * Lewis Latimer created the carbon filament for the light bulb.
  * Black people created National Medical Association, so people of color get the right to be represented. Mika Corbett helped make the Covid 19 Medicine.

• Afrofuturism:
  * Blending Black experiences from the past with an Afrocentric vision of a technologically advanced future (data science, forecasting, and AI).
  * Black Panther is an example of this in action

• Key Takeaways:
  * Civil rights movement: Long fight for equality, involving many.
  * Brown versus Board of Education: Made segregation illegal.
  * Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968.
  Violent response from those against black progress.
  Different ideas about achieving equality.
  Black people continue to advance in all aspects of life.