AP African American Studies Themes Review

This theme tracks how the movement of people, both forced and voluntary, built and reshaped African diaspora communities across time. It asks you to hold two ideas at once: displacement as violence and migration as agency. Forced migration includes the transatlantic slave trade. Voluntary migration includes the Great Migration north and west in the twentieth century.

• Transatlantic slave trade: Forced migration of millions of Africans to the Americas that created the African diaspora and is the foundational event of the course.
• African diaspora: The global dispersal of people of African descent and the cultural, political, and social connections they maintained across national boundaries.
• Great Migration: The movement of approximately six million Black Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities between roughly 1910 and 1970, driven by Jim Crow violence and economic opportunity.
• Push and pull factors: Forces that drive people away from a place (push) or attract them to a new one (pull); used to analyze both forced and voluntary migration patterns.

This theme keeps you thinking about how multiple categories of identity operate simultaneously rather than in isolation. Race, ethnicity, class, nationality, gender, region, religion, and ability all overlap and shape how people live, what they fight for, and how others treat them. The course uses this theme to complicate any single-axis analysis.

• Intersectionality: A framework, developed by scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, for understanding how overlapping systems of identity and oppression interact to produce distinct experiences.
• Double consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois's concept describing the tension of being both Black and American, always seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that devalues Blackness.
• Gender and race: The course examines how Black women faced compounded forms of discrimination and how their leadership in movements was often minimized despite being central.
• Class stratification: Economic position within Black communities shaped access to education, political power, and geographic mobility, and intersected with race to produce varied experiences.

This theme treats Black art, music, literature, and performance as primary sources and analytical evidence. Creative works are arguments about identity, justice, survival, and culture. The theme runs across every unit and asks you to read a blues song, a slave narrative, a protest poem, or a mural the same way you would read a political document.

• Slave narrative: First-person accounts of enslaved life, such as those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, that served as abolitionist evidence and assertions of humanity.
• Harlem Renaissance: A flowering of Black artistic, literary, and intellectual production centered in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s that used culture to assert dignity and challenge racism.
• Blues and jazz: Musical forms rooted in African American experience that expressed suffering, resilience, and joy and became foundational to American and global culture.
• Black Arts Movement: A 1960s and 1970s cultural movement that linked artistic production explicitly to Black political liberation and community self-determination.

This theme shows how African Americans innovated methods to resist oppression and assert agency across every period of the course. Resistance is not only dramatic confrontation. It includes everyday acts, cultural production, legal challenges, institution-building, and armed revolt. Resilience refers to the capacity to sustain community and identity under conditions designed to destroy both.

• Maroon communities: Self-liberated communities of formerly enslaved people in the Americas who established independent settlements and resisted recapture, representing organized resistance to slavery.
• Abolitionism: The organized movement to end slavery, involving both Black and white activists, that used moral argument, legal pressure, and direct action.
• Civil disobedience: Nonviolent refusal to comply with unjust laws, used extensively in the civil rights movement through sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches.
• Black Power: A political movement of the 1960s and 1970s that emphasized Black self-determination, cultural pride, and community control as forms of resistance beyond legal integration.