AP® African American Studies

Course Essential Questions

• What cultural, social, and political aspects of West and Central Africa had an impact on the Transatlantic Black World and their descendants?
• What cultural features did African descendants maintain and what did they encounter and adopt outside of the African continent?
• How did African descendants in the United States and the Caribbean resist oppressive conditions through creative coalitions and institution building?
• How did Black activists, clergy, educators, creatives, and organizers use their art and/or activism to negotiate the social, political, and aesthetic moments of their day?

Course Learning Objectives

• Analyze and explain how over time, Africa has been a symbol that influences the cultural practices, artistic expression, identities, and political organizing of African Americans in the United States and the broader African diaspora in divergent ways.
• Analyze how intersections of identity shape individuals' experiences and perspectives.
• Examine the context and audience of African American forms of expression to describe their global influence and the way they have changed over time.
• Evaluate how various forms of resistance and resilience have evolved within Black communities in the United States, and in connection to the broader African diaspora.
• Explain cultural, historical, political and social concepts, developments, patterns, and processes.
• Evaluate written and visual sources and data to describe and draw conclusions about and make connections to AP African American Studies.
• Develop an argument using a line of reasoning to connect claims and evidence

Unit 1: Origins of African Diaspora (Weeks 1-5)

Unit Level Essential Questions

• What geopolitical, social and intellectual ideas are essential to the understanding of Africa and African American Studies?
• What role did West Central African governance within African Kingdoms play in Africa's interaction with Western nations?
• How has the geography, religious traditions, and social practices influenced Blacks in the Americas over time?

Week 1: What is African American Studies?

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the features that characterize African American Studies.
• Describe the developments that led to the incorporation of African American Studies into United States colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Explain how African American Studies enriches the study of early Africa and its relationship to communities of the African diaspora.
• Describe the geographic features of the African continent.
• Explain how Africa’s varied landscape affected patterns of settlement and trade between diverse cultural regions.
• Describe the causes of Bantu expansion across the African continent.
• Explain how the Bantu expansion affected the linguistic diversity of West and Central Africa and the genetic heritage of African Americans

Week 2: Ancient Africa

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the features of, and goods produced by, complex societies that emerged in ancient East and West Africa
• Explain why Africa’s ancient societies are culturally and historically significant to Black communities.
• Explain how the influence of gold and trade shaped the political, economic, and religious development of the ancient West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.
• Explain how Mali’s wealth and power created opportunities for the empire to expand its reach to other societies within Africa and across the Mediterranean.
• Explain the connection between the Sudanic empires and early generations of African Americans.

Week 3: Education, Religion, and Culture in West and Central Africa

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the institutional and community-based models of education present in early West African societies.
• Explain how syncretic practices in early West and West Central African societies developed and were carried forward in African-descended communities in the Americas.
• Describe the function and importance of Great Zimbabwe’s stone architecture.
• Explain how geographic, cultural, and political factors contributed to the rise and fall of the city-states on the Swahili Coast.

Week 4: Kingdom of Kongo

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how the adoption of Christianity affected economic and religious aspects of the Kingdom of Kongo.
• Explain how the Kingdom of Kongo’s political relations with Portugal affected the kingdom’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade.
• Explain how the Kingdom of Kongo’s Christian culture influenced early generations of African Americans.

Week 5: African Leadership and influence at home and abroad

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the function of kinship along with the varied roles women played in early West and Central African societies
• Compare the political and military leadership of Queen Idia of Benin and Queen Njinga of Ndongo-Matamba
• Describe the legacy of Queen Idia of Benin’s and Queen Njinga of Ndongo-Matamba’s leadership.
• Explain the reasons why Africans went to Europe and Europeans went to Africa before the onset of the transatlantic slave trade.
• Explain how early forms of enslaved labor by the Portuguese shaped slave based economies in the Americas.

Unit 2: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance (Weeks 6-14)

Unit Level Essential Questions

• What were the methods and tactics that Africans and Afro descendants employed to resist slavery and other forms of racial violence?
• How did the social construction of race shape the realities of chattel slavery and culture in the Americas?
• In what ways did the unique gendered experiences of Black men and women shape the political and social realities of life during the period of enslavement in the Americas?

Week 6: African Exploration and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain the significance of the roles ladinos played as the first Africans to arrive in the territory that became the United States.
• Describe the diverse roles Africans played during colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century.
• Describe the scale and geographic scope of the transatlantic slave trade.
• Identify the primary slave trading zones in Africa from which Africans were forcibly taken.
• Explain how the distribution of distinct African ethnic groups during the era of slavery shaped the development of African American communities in the United States.
• Describe the conditions of the three-part journey enslaved Africans endured during the transatlantic slave trade.
• Explain how the transatlantic slave trade destabilized West African societies.
• Describe the key features and purposes of narratives written by formerly enslaved Africans.

Week 7: American Chattel Slavery, Resistance, and Culture

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the methods by which Africans resisted their commodification and enslavement individually and collectively during the Middle Passage.
• Describe the features of slave ship diagrams created during the era of the slave trade.
• Explain how Africans’ resistance on slave ships and slave ship diagrams inspired abolitionists and Black artists during the era of slavery and after.
• Describe the nature of slave auctions in the nineteenth century United States South.
• Explain how African American authors advanced the causes of abolition and equality in their writings about slave auctions.
• Explain how the growth of the cotton industry in the United States displaced enslaved African American families.
• Describe the range and variety of specialized roles performed by enslaved people.
• Explain how slave labor systems affected the formation of African American musical and linguistic practices.

Week 8: Labor and Slave Codes

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the range and variety of specialized roles performed by enslaved people.
• Explain how slave labor systems affected the formation of African American musical and linguistic practices.
• Evaluate the economic effects of enslaved people’s commodification and labor, within and outside of African American communities
• Explain how American law affected the lives and citizenship rights of enslaved and free African Americans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Explain how slave codes developed in response to African Americans’ resistance to slavery.

Week 9: Race, Identity, and Black Pride

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how partus sequitur ventrem affected African American families and informed the emergence of racial taxonomies in the United States.
• Explain how racial concepts and classifications emerged alongside definitions of status.
• Describe African American forms of self-expression in art, music, and language that combine influences from diverse African cultures with local sources.
• Describe ways enslaved African Americans adapted African musical elements from their ancestors and influenced the development of American musical genres.
• Explain the multiple functions and significance of spirituals.
• Explain how changing demographics and popular debates about African Americans’ identity influenced the terms they used to identify themselves in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Week 10: Resistance and Rebellion

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain key effects of the asylum offered by Spanish Florida in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• Explain the global impacts of the Haitian Revolution.
• Describe the role of maroons in the Haitian Revolution.
• Explain the impacts of the Haitian Revolution on African diasporic communities and Black political thought.
• Describe the daily forms of resistance demonstrated by enslaved and free African Americans
• Describe the inspirations, goals, and struggles of different revolts and abolitionist organizing led by enslaved and free Afro-descendants throughout the Americas.

Week 11: Gender, Education, and Transnational Radicalism

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how free Black people in the North and South organized to support their communities.
• Describe the techniques used by Black women activists to advocate for social justice and reform.
• Explain why Black women’s activism is historically and culturally significant.
• Describe the characteristics of maroon communities and the areas where they emerged across the African diaspora.
• Describe the purposes of maroon wars throughout the African diaspora.
• Describe features of the enslavement of Africans in Brazil.
• Explain shifts in the numbers of enslaved Africans in Brazil and the United States during the nineteenth century.
• Explain how the expansion of slavery in the United States South affected relations between Black and Indigenous people.

Week 12: Belonging and Radical Resistance

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how nineteenth-century emigrationists aimed to achieve the goal of Black freedom and self determination.
• Explain how transatlantic abolitionism influenced antiemigrationists’ political views about the potential for African Americans’ belonging in American society.
• Describe the features of nineteenth-century radical resistance strategies promoted by Black activists to demand change.

Week 13: Abolitionism and Resistance Through Art and Slave Narratives

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the role and scale of the Underground Railroad in providing freedom-seeking routes.
• Explain the significance of Harriet Tubman’s contributions to abolitionism and African Americans’ pursuit of freedom.
• Explain the significance of visual depictions of African American leaders in photography and art during and after the era of slavery.
• Explain how enslaved women used methods of resistance against sexual violence.
• Explain how gender affected the genre and themes of slave narratives in the nineteenth century.
• Explain the impact of Black women’s enslavement narratives on political movements in the nineteenth century.

Week 14: The Civil War and the Fight for Freedom

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe enslaved and free African American men’s and women’s contributions during the United States Civil War.
• Describe African American soldiers’ motivations for enlisting during the United States Civil War and the inequities they faced.
• Explain how Black soldiers’ service affected Black communities during and after the United States Civil War.
• Describe the events that officially ended legal enslavement in the United States.
• Explain why Juneteenth is historically and culturally significant.

Week 15: Review and Assessment Week

Unit 3: The Practice of Freedom (Weeks 16-22)

Unit Level Essential Questions

• How did legal victories and setbacks result in both the flourishing and destruction of Black lives in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries?
• How did the emergence of Black institutions and organizations help build the foundation for the struggle for Civil Rights for Black men and women?
• How did events during the era of the Great Migration inspire artistic movements and political action?

Week 16: Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Black Codes

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how the Reconstruction Amendments impacted African Americans by defining standards of citizenship.
• Explain how the Fifteenth Amendment impacted African Americans’ participation in American politics.
• Describe the purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
• Explain how after abolition and the Civil War, African Americans strengthened family bonds that had been disrupted by enslavement.
• Explain how Black Codes undermined the ability of African Americans to advance after the abolition of slavery.
• Explain how new labor practices impeded the ability of African Americans to advance economically after the abolition of slavery.

Week 17: The End of Reconstruction and the Rise of Violence

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how Reconstruction era reforms were dismantled during the late nineteenth century.
• Explain how the introduction of Jim Crow laws impacted African Americans after Reconstruction.
• Describe the responses of African American writers and activists to racism and anti-Black violence during the nadir.
• Explain how African Americans responded to white supremacist attacks in the early twentieth century.

Week 18: Racial Uplift and Double Consciousness at the turn of the 20th century

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how groundbreaking texts like Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk—and the dialogue these texts generated—portray Black humanity and the effects of racism on African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Describe strategies for racial uplift (or social advancement) proposed by African American writers, educators, and leaders at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Describe ways that Black women promoted the advancement of African Americans.

Week 19: Black Institutions and the Harlem Renaissance

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how African Americans promoted the economic stability and well-being of their communities in the early twentieth century
• Describe the founding of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Explain how the creation of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States impacted the educational and professional lives of African Americans nationally and internationally.
• Describe ways the New Negro movement emphasized self definition, racial pride, and cultural innovation.

Week 20: The Harlem Renaissance in Art, Pictures, and Theater

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how African Americans used visual media in the twentieth century to enact social change.
• Explain how Harlem Renaissance poets express their relationships to Africa in their poetry.
• Describe African Americans’ contributions to American music in the 1930s and 1940s.
• Describe African Americans’ contributions to American theater and film in the 1930s and 1940s.

Week 21: The Great Migration and the Shift in Black Education

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain why New Negro movement writers, artists, and educators strove to research and disseminate Black history to Black students.
• Describe the development and aims of the Black intellectual tradition that predates the formal integration of African American Studies into American colleges and universities in the mid twentieth century
• Describe the causes of the Great Migration
• Explain the impact of the Great Migration on Black communities and American culture.

Week 22: Marcus Garvey and the Black Atlantic

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the effects of AfroCaribbean migration to the United States in the early twentieth century and the migration’s effect on African American communities.
• Describe the effects of AfroCaribbean migration to the United States in the early twentieth century and the migration’s effect on African American communities.
• Describe the impact of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) on political thought throughout the African diaspora.

Unit 4: Movements and Debates (Weeks 23-26)

Unit Level Essential Questions

• How were the varieties of Black political and social experiences in the Americas debated and how did they impact burgeoning political movements in the early 20th century?
• How did the participation of Black men and women in Civil Rights and Black Power Movements result in social and political advancements for Black people in the United States?
• How has the rise of various religious traditions, cultural movements, and technologies create new experiences and possibilities for Black social and political life in the late 20th and early 21st century?

Week 23: Black Intellectual Thought in the Black Atlantic during WW2

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the context of and connections between the Négritude and Negrismo movements in the first half of the twentieth century
• Explain why proponents of Négritude and Negrismo critiqued colonialism.
• Describe the Black Freedom movement in the twentieth century.
• Describe examples of diasporic solidarity that emerged across the African diaspora in the twentieth century.
• Explain how diasporic solidarity between African Americans and Africans impacted Black politics in the U.S. and abroad in the twentieth century and beyond.
• Describe African Americans’ involvement in the Second World War.
• Explain how the Double V Campaign emerged during the Second World War.
• Describe African Americans’ access to the benefits of the G.I. Bill.

Week 24: Discrimination and the Evolution of the Civil Rights Movement

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the enduring forms of segregation and discrimination in daily life that African Americans faced in the first half of the twentieth century.
• Explain the rationale for the Brown v. Board of Education decision to overturn “separate but equal.”
• Explain how different groups responded to school integration as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
• Explain the long-term effects of housing discrimination on African Americans in the second half of the twentieth century.
• Describe the essential methods of the major civil rights organizations.
• Explain how nonviolent resistance strategies mobilized the Civil Rights movement.
• Explain how civil rights activism in the mid-twentieth century led to federal legislative achievements.

Week 25: Protest and Politics

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the ways Black women leaders furthered the goals of the major civil rights organizations and grassroots efforts.
• Describe the ways grassroots organizing beyond the South advanced the goals of the Civil Rights movement.
• Explain how artists, performers, poets, and musicians of African descent advocated for racial equality and brought international attention to the Black Freedom movement.
• Explain how faith and music inspired African Americans to combat continued discrimination during the Civil Rights movement.
• Describe the origins and beliefs of the Nation of Islam.
• Explain how Black Freedom movement strategies transitioned from civil rights to Black Power.

Week 26: The Black Power Movement and Black Economic and Political Power

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Explain how the Black Arts movement (BAM) influenced Black culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Explain how the Black Arts movement influenced the development of African American Studies.
• Explain how the Black Panther Party pursued political, economic, and social reforms in the twentieth century.
• Describe the emergence of the Black is Beautiful movement and Afrocentricity in the mid twentieth century.
• Explain how the Black is Beautiful movement and Afrocentricity influenced Black culture in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
• Explain how the Black is Beautiful movement and Afrocentricity influenced the development of African American Studies and ethnic studies.
• Explain how the Black feminist movement of the twentieth century drew inspiration from earlier Black women’s activism.
• Describe the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression” and its connection to earlier Black feminist activism.
• Explain how Black writers have represented interlocking systems of oppression in their work.
• Explain how economic growth in Black communities has been hindered and promoted in the second half of the twentieth century.
• Explain how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 impacted the growth of Black political representation in American politics in the late twentieth century.
• Describe major advances in Black federal political leadership in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

Week 27: Religion, Pop Culture, and the Diversity of the Black Community

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe ways the African American population has grown and become more diverse since 2000.
• Explain how religion and faith have played dynamic social, educational, and community building roles in African American communities.
• Describe ways African American music blends musical and performative traditions from Africa.
• Describe the influence of the African American musical tradition on American and global music genres.
• Describe the origins and elements that define hip-hop culture.
• Explain how African American political and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s influence the emergence of hip-hop.
• Describe representations of African Americans on the stage and screen by African Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• Explain how migration and economic growth influenced representations of African Americans in television and film.

Week 28: African American Contributions to Sports, Medicine, and Disability Rights

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Describe the contributions of Black athletes to sports in the nineteenth century and beyond.
• Explain how African American athletes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have contested discrimination and advocated for racial equality.
• Describe African Americans’ contributions to scientific or technological advancements.
• Describe African Americans’ contributions to American medical care, training, and medical advancements.
• Describe multiple, compounding forms of discrimination against Black people with disabilities as well as governmental responses.
• Explain how the discipline of African American Studies has contributed to interdisciplinary academic studies.
• Explain how Afrofuturism envisions Black lives in futuristic environments.

Week 29: Presentations and Further Exploration

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Present your Individual Student Research Project.
• Participate in student-directed study and exploration.

Week 30: Review and Assessment Week

Week 31: AP Practice Exam

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Review content from the year.
• Complete a full-length AP Practice Exam.

Week 32: Reflect on the AP Practice

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Reflect on AP Practice Exam performance.
• Identify areas of confusion and resources for review.

Week 33: Wrap Up

Weekly Learning Objectives

• Reflect on course experience.
• Share final thoughts with classmates.