AP African American Studies FRQ Practice

✊🏿AP African American Studies

Practice FRQ 1 of 421/42

1. Evaluate the extent to which African Americans redefined their cultural identity and social consciousness from 1886 to 1926.

In your response you should do the following:

Respond to the prompt with a defensible thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning.
Describe a broader historical or disciplinary context relevant to the topic of the prompt.
Support an argument in response to the prompt using at least three of the sources.
Use at least one additional piece of specific evidence (beyond that found in the sources) relevant to your argument.
For at least two sources, explain how or why the perspective, purpose, context, and/or audience for each source is relevant to your argument.
Reference or cite the sources you use in your argument. You can reference or cite the source letter, title, or author.

Document 1

Source: "Heritage" by Countee Cullen, 1925

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who all day long

Want no sound except the song

Sung by wild barbaric birds

Goading massive jungle herds,

Juggernauts of flesh that pass

Trampling tall defiant grass

Where young forest lovers lie,

Plighting troth beneath the sky.

Document 2

Source: Alain Locke, a scholar in New York City, article about a cultural shift published in Survey Graphic magazine, March 1925

The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the lifeattitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about.... To all of this the New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture.... He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization. The great social gain in this is the releasing of our talented group from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression.

Document 3

Source: "The Negro Digs Up His Past" by Arturo A. Schomburg, in The New Negro: An Interpretation edited by Alain Locke, 1925

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset.

Document 4

Source: Pullman Palace Cars, 1886.

Document 5

Source: "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes, 1926

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.\"

\"Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz.\"

\"The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites.