✊🏿AP African American Studies
Key Terms

398 essential vocabulary terms and definitions to know for your AP African American Studies exam

✊🏿AP African American Studies
Key Terms by Unit

Unit 1 – Origins of the African Diaspora

1.1 What Is African American Studies?

1.10 Kinship and Political Leadership

1.11 Global Africans

1.2 The African Continent: A Varied Landscape

1.3 Population Growth and Ethnolinguistic Diversity

1.4 Africa's Ancient Societies

1.5 The Sudanic Empires: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai

1.6 Learning Traditions

1.7 Indigenous Cosmologies and Religious Syncretism

1.8 Culture and Trade in Southern and East Africa

1.9 West Central Africa: The Kingdom of Kongo

Unit 2 – Freedom, Enslavement and Resistance

2.1 African Explorers in the Americas

2.10 Black Pride, Identity, and the Question of Naming

2.11 The Stono Rebellion and Fort Mose

2.12 Legacies of the Haitian Revolution

2.13 Resistance and Revolts in the United States

2.14 Black Organizing in the North: Freedom, Women's Rights, and Education

2.15 Maroon Societies and Autonomous Black Communities

2.16 Diasporic Connections: Slavery and Freedom in Brazil

2.17 African Americans in Indigenous Territory

2.18 Debates About Emigration, Colonization, and Belonging in America

2.19 Black Political Thought: Radical Resistance

2.2 Departure Zones in Africa and the Slave Trade to the United States

2.20 Race to the Promised Land: Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad

2.21 Legacies of Resistance in African American Art and Photography

2.22 Gender and Resistance in Slave Narratives

2.23 The Civil War and Black Communities

2.24 Freedom Days: Commemorating the Ongoing Struggle for Freedom

2.3 Capture and the Impact of the Slave Trade on West African Societies

2.4 African Resistance on Slave Ships and the Antislavery Movement

2.5 Slave Auctions and the Domestic Slave Trade

2.6 Labor, Culture, and Economy

2.7 Slavery and American Law: Slave Codes and Landmark Cases

2.8 The Social Construction of Race and the Reproduction of Status

2.9 Creating African American Culture

Unit 3 – The Practice of Freedom

3.1 The Reconstruction Amendments

3.10 HBCUs, Black Greek Letter Organizations, and Black Education

3.11 The New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance

3.12 Photography and Social Change

3.13 Envisioning Africa in Harlem Renaissance Poetry

3.14 Symphony in Black: Black Performance in Music, Theater, and Film

3.15 Black History Education and African American Studies

3.16 The Great Migration

3.17 Afro-Caribbean Migration

3.18 The Universal Negro Improvement Association

3.2 Social Life: Reuniting Black Families and the Freedmen's Bureau

3.3 Black Codes, Land, and Labor

3.4 The Defeat of Reconstruction

3.5 Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow Laws

3.6 White Supremacist Violence and the Red Summer

3.7 The Color Line and Double Consciousness in American Society

3.8 Lifting as We Climb: Uplift Ideologies and Black Women's Rights and Leadership

3.9 Black Organizations and Institutions

Unit 4 – Movements and Debates

4.10 The Black Arts Movement

4.1 The Négritude and Negrismo Movements

4.11 The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

4.12 Black Is Beautiful and Afrocentricity

4.13 The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality

4.14 Interlocking Systems of Oppression

4.15 Economic Growth and Black Political Representation

4.16 Demographic and Religious Diversity in Contemporary Black Communities

4.17 The Evolution of African American Music: From Spirituals to Hip-Hop

4.18 Black Life in Theater, TV, and Film

4.19 African Americans and Sports

4.2 Anticolonialism and Black Political Thought

4.20 Science, Medicine, and Technology in Black Communities

4.21 Black Studies, Black Futures, and Afrofuturism

4.3 African Americans and the Second World War: The Double V Campaign and the G.I. Bill

4.4 Discrimination, Segregation, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

4.5 Redlining and Housing Discrimination

4.6 Major Civil Rights Organizations

4.7 Black Women's Leadership and Grassroots Organizing in the Civil Rights Movement

4.8 The Arts, Music, and the Politics of Freedom

4.9 Black Religious Nationalism and the Black Power Movement

Browse All A-Z

Browse All A-Z