120 Key Terms for AP® African American Studies: Your Complete Study Glossary

By Brian Stewart, Barron’s SAT, ACT & PSAT Author & Perfect SAT/ACT Scorer

AP® African American Studies is an interdisciplinary course that moves from the societies of early Africa through the transatlantic slave trade, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, all the way to twenty-first century debates about Black identity, politics, and culture. You can’t memorize everything, and the exam isn’t really a memorization test anyway — it is a skills-based exam that asks you to analyze unfamiliar primary sources, literary texts, visual art, and data. But you do need a strong grip on the vocabulary that comes up again and again in the College Board’s materials, because almost every multiple-choice question assumes you can recognize what is being described and connect it to broader patterns in the course.

Below are 120 AP African American Studies terms organized by the four units of the course, each with a concise, student-friendly definition. This is a review list aligned to the AP African American Studies course framework — not an official College Board canon — so treat it as a solid study foundation rather than the last word. For the broader strategic picture of the exam, including how to read stimulus passages and the biggest multiple-choice mistakes students make, see the companion guide on the AP African American Studies practice page.

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Unit 1: Origins of the African Diaspora — 20–25%

1. African American Studies. An interdisciplinary field that analyzes the history, culture, and contributions of people of African descent in the United States and throughout the African diaspora, using tools from history, literature, the arts, and the social sciences.
2. African diaspora. The global community of people of African descent who trace their heritage to the forced and voluntary dispersals of Africans throughout world history, especially those driven by the transatlantic slave trade.
3. Black Campus movement (1965–1972). A wave of student protests at more than 1,000 colleges that led to the creation of Black Studies departments, beginning with San Francisco State College in 1968. The academic foundation of the discipline you are studying.
4. Bantu expansion. A series of migrations between roughly 1500 BCE and 500 CE in which Bantu-speaking peoples spread throughout West, Central, and Southern Africa, carrying languages, agriculture, and ironworking technologies.
5. Sahel. The semiarid belt of Africa just south of the Sahara where early population centers and the great West African empires emerged; the word means “coast” in Arabic, reflecting the region’s role as the southern shore of the Saharan trade routes.
6. Nubia (Kush). An ancient Nile Valley society that emerged around 3000 BCE, famous for its gold and for briefly conquering Egypt and establishing the twenty-fifth dynasty of Kushite pharaohs around 750 BCE.
7. Aksumite Empire. An East African empire (roughly present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia) that rose around the 1st century CE, minted its own currency, developed the Ge’ez script, and became the first sub-Saharan African kingdom to officially adopt Christianity under King Ezana.
8. Nok society. One of the earliest ironworking societies of West Africa (emerging by roughly 500 BCE in present-day Nigeria), known for its distinctive terracotta sculptures and considered a possible ancestor of the Ife Yoruba and Benin cultures.
9. Sudanic (Sahelian) Empires. The successive West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai that flourished between the seventh and sixteenth centuries on the strength of trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt.
10. Mansa Musa. The fourteenth-century ruler of Mali whose legendary wealth and 1324 hajj to Mecca drew the attention of Mediterranean and European merchants and cartographers.
11. Timbuktu. A Malian trading city that became a renowned center of Islamic learning, drawing astronomers, mathematicians, architects, and jurists.
12. Griot. A prestigious West African historian, storyteller, and musician who preserved a community’s history, traditions, and genealogies through oral performance; the Epic of Sundiata, which recounts the life of Mali’s founder Sundiata Keita, is the best-known text in this tradition.
13. Oral tradition. The passing down of history, genealogy, values, and cultural practices through spoken performance rather than written text; griots served as the professional keepers of this tradition in West Africa, and oral traditions carried across the Atlantic in the storytelling, preaching, and musical practices of enslaved African Americans.
14. Great Zimbabwe. The stone-walled capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe in Southern Africa (twelfth to fifteenth centuries), built by the Shona people and tied to Swahili Coast trade networks in gold and ivory.
15. Swahili Coast. The East African coastline stretching from Somalia to Mozambique whose city-states linked the African interior to Arab, Persian, Indian, and Chinese trading communities and were united by the Swahili language (a Bantu lingua franca) and Islam.
16. Kingdom of Kongo. A powerful West Central African kingdom whose king Nzinga a Nkuwu (João I) and his son Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I) voluntarily converted to Roman Catholicism in 1491, producing a distinctive form of African Catholicism.
17. Queen Njinga. The seventeenth-century ruler of the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba (in present-day Angola) who waged thirty years of guerilla warfare against the Portuguese to protect her sovereignty.
18. Queen Idia. The iyoba (queen mother) of the Kingdom of Benin under her son Oba Esigie (r. 1504–1550), who advised the king and became an iconic symbol of Black women’s leadership across the African diaspora.
19. Kinship. The system of extended family and lineage ties that organized many early West and Central African societies, forming the basis for political alliances, inheritance, and identity; kinship structures persisted in adapted forms through the Middle Passage and became the foundation of postemancipation family reunification efforts.
20. Religious syncretism. The blending of African Indigenous spiritual beliefs with introduced faiths such as Islam and Christianity; this blending carried across the Atlantic and survives in diasporic religions including Louisiana Voodoo, Cuban Regla de Ocha-Ifá (Santería), Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou, which often honor orishas such as Shango, the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning.
21. Trans-Saharan trade. The network of caravan routes across the Sahara that connected sub-Saharan West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold, salt, enslaved people, and Islam south into the Sahelian empires.
22. Atlantic creoles. The generation of Africans who worked as intermediaries between African, European, and Indigenous American societies before chattel slavery became dominant; their multilingualism and cultural familiarity gave them a degree of social mobility.

Try a Mali & West African Empires Drill →

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Unit 2: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance — 30–35%

23. Ladinos. Free and enslaved Africans familiar with Iberian culture and languages who journeyed with the earliest European explorers of the Americas; they were among the first Africans in the territory that became the United States.
24. Juan Garrido. A free African conquistador, born in West or West Central Africa, who joined a Spanish expedition to present-day Florida in 1513, becoming the first known African to arrive in what became the continental United States.
25. Transatlantic slave trade. The roughly 350-year forced migration (early 1500s to mid-1800s) that transported approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas; only about 5 percent (approximately 388,000) came directly to what became the United States.
26. Middle Passage. The horrific ocean voyage between Africa and the Americas — the second leg of the three-part journey endured by enslaved Africans — during which roughly fifteen percent of captives perished.
27. Senegambia. The West African region around the Senegal and Gambia rivers; along with West Central Africa (Angola/Kongo), it was one of the two largest source regions for enslaved Africans shipped directly to North America, and together the two regions account for roughly half of all arrivals.
28. Second Middle Passage. The forced domestic relocation of more than one million enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the cotton-producing Lower South during the antebellum era — the largest forced migration in American history.
29. Slave codes. Race-based legal codes that defined chattel slavery as an inheritable, lifelong condition and restricted the movement, assembly, literacy, and self-defense of enslaved people; parallel systems included the French Code Noir and the Spanish Código Negro.
30. Partus sequitur ventrem. A 1662 Virginia law, later adopted across the colonies, that defined a child’s legal status — enslaved or free — by the status of the mother, thus making slavery an inheritable condition passed through the mother.
31. Elizabeth Key. A woman of African and English descent who in 1656 became one of the first Black women in North America to successfully sue for her freedom; her case helped prompt the passage of partus sequitur ventrem.
32. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). The Supreme Court decision that ruled African Americans, enslaved or free, could never be citizens of the United States; it was later overturned by the Reconstruction Amendments.
33. Stono Rebellion (1739). The largest slave revolt in the British mainland colonies, led near the Stono River in South Carolina by captives from the Kingdom of Kongo; it prompted South Carolina’s severe 1740 slave code.
34. Fort Mose. A free Black settlement established near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1738, serving as a sanctuary for Africans who escaped British slavery.
35. Gullah. A creole language and culture that developed among enslaved African Americans in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, combining West African and European linguistic elements and preserving African performative traditions such as the ring shout.
36. Spirituals. Religious folk songs created by enslaved African Americans that blended Christian hymns with African rhythmic and performative elements such as call and response, clapping, improvisation, and syncopation; songs like “Steal Away to Jesus” expressed faith and sometimes carried coded messages about resistance and escape, and spirituals became the foundation of later American musical genres including gospel and the blues.
37. Phillis Wheatley. An enslaved Senegambian-born poet who in 1773 became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, helping to establish the political and literary tradition of African American writing.
38. Olaudah Equiano. An Igbo-born writer whose 1789 autobiography (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano) became one of the most influential slave narratives and a major text of the transatlantic abolitionist movement.
39. Slave narrative. A literary genre written by formerly enslaved people that served as historical testimony, literary art, and abolitionist political argument by documenting Black humanity and the horrors of enslavement; Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was the first slave narrative written and published by a woman who had escaped slavery in the United States.
40. La Amistad. The Spanish schooner on which Mende captive Sengbe Pieh (also called Joseph Cinque) led a revolt in 1839; the U.S. Supreme Court eventually granted the captives their freedom, generating public sympathy for abolition.
41. Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The only successful uprising of enslaved people that overturned a colonial, enslaving government; it transformed French Saint-Domingue into the independent Black republic of Haiti — the second independent nation in the Americas.

Try a Middle Passage & Slave Trade Drill →

42. Toussaint L’Ouverture. The most famous leader of the Haitian Revolution, whose struggle became a global symbol of Black freedom and sovereignty and was later memorialized in a series of paintings by Jacob Lawrence.
43. Maroon societies. Autonomous communities of Afro-descendants who escaped slavery and established free settlements in remote areas throughout the African diaspora, from Brazil and Jamaica to Florida and the Great Dismal Swamp.
44. Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 (German Coast Uprising). The largest slave revolt on United States soil, led by Charles Deslondes with inspiration from the Haitian Revolution.
45. Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831). A Virginia slave revolt inspired by religious vision and led by Nat Turner; it resulted in the deaths of about sixty white Virginians and triggered harsh legal backlash across the South.
46. David Walker’s Appeal (1829). A radical antislavery pamphlet by Boston abolitionist David Walker that called for the immediate end of slavery and, if necessary, violent resistance; it circulated secretly through the South and rejected both colonization and Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories.
47. Henry Highland Garnet. An abolitionist minister whose 1843 “Address to the Slaves of the United States” urged enslaved people to use any means necessary to achieve freedom; later he served as U.S. minister to Liberia.
48. Maria W. Stewart. The first Black woman to publish a political manifesto and one of the first American women to give a public address; her 1830s activism helped establish an early tradition of Black women’s public political thought that fed into later women’s rights and abolitionist movements.
49. Emigration versus colonization debates. The nineteenth-century argument among African Americans over whether to pursue freedom by leaving the United States; Black-led emigrationists such as Paul Cuffee and Martin R. Delany voluntarily advocated relocation to Africa, the Caribbean, or Latin America, while anti-emigrationists like Frederick Douglass argued that Black Americans had a rightful claim to the United States as their home.
50. American Colonization Society. A white-led organization founded in 1816 that sought to remove free Black people from the United States by resettling them in West Africa, particularly in Liberia; it was rejected by most Black abolitionists.
51. Martin R. Delany. A Black nationalist leader who championed emigration and Black self-determination and became the first Black field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War.
52. Frederick Douglass. The most famous nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, orator, and writer; author of multiple autobiographies, publisher of the North Star, and later U.S. Minister to Haiti (1889–1891).
53. Harriet Tubman. The best-known conductor of the Underground Railroad, a Union Army spy and nurse, and the first American woman to lead a major military operation, at the Combahee River raid (1863).
54. Underground Railroad. A covert nineteenth-century network of resistance, assistance, and escape routes — run by Black and white abolitionists and self-liberated African Americans — that helped enslaved people seek freedom in the North, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere.
55. Fugitive Slave Acts (1793 and 1850). Federal laws that authorized the capture and return of enslaved people who escaped to free states, forcing Black abolitionists like Douglass to seek refuge abroad.
56. Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Abraham Lincoln’s wartime executive order declaring freedom for enslaved people held in Confederate states still at war with the Union; it also opened the way for Black soldiers to enlist.
57. Thirteenth Amendment (1865). The constitutional amendment that formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, “except as a punishment for a crime.”
58. Juneteenth. The commemoration of June 19, 1865, the day Union General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, informing enslaved people there of their freedom; it is now a federal holiday.

Try an Abolitionism & Underground Railroad Drill →

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Unit 3: The Practice of Freedom — 20–25%

59. Reconstruction (1865–1877). The period after the Civil War during which the federal government sought to reintegrate the former Confederate states and to establish citizenship, equal rights, and political representation for formerly enslaved African Americans.
60. Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth (1865, abolishing slavery), Fourteenth (1868, establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection), and Fifteenth (1870, prohibiting racial denial of voting rights) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
61. Freedmen’s Bureau. The federal agency (officially the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) created in 1865 to provide education, legal aid, and support for reuniting Black families separated by enslavement.
62. Black Codes. Restrictive laws enacted by Southern states in 1865–1866 that attempted to control the labor and movement of newly freed African Americans, effectively re-imposing many of the controls of the slave codes.
63. Special Field Orders No. 15 (“40 acres and a mule”). Union General William T. Sherman’s 1865 order redistributing coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to freed families; President Andrew Johnson revoked the order later that year.
64. Sharecropping. A post-emancipation labor system in which landowners provided land and supplies to Black farmers in exchange for a large share of the crop, trapping many in cycles of debt.
65. Convict leasing. A post-Civil War system in which southern prisons hired out incarcerated African American men, who had often been arrested on minor charges, to labor without pay on plantations and in industry.
66. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine, providing legal cover for Jim Crow segregation until it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
67. Jim Crow. The system of state and local laws that mandated racial segregation in the American South (and many other parts of the country) from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights movement; the name came from a blackface minstrel performance by T.D. Rice.
68. Disenfranchisement. The systematic denial of voting rights to African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South through mechanisms such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries; disenfranchisement was not fully dismantled until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
69. The Nadir. Historian Rayford Logan’s term for the low point of African American life between the end of Reconstruction and the early twentieth century, defined by disenfranchisement, lynching, and legalized segregation.
70. Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The pioneering journalist and antilynching activist whose investigative writing (including A Red Record, 1895) exposed the racist motives behind Southern lynching and launched a global antilynching campaign.

Try a Jim Crow & Disenfranchisement Drill →

71. Red Summer (1919). The wave of white supremacist violence across more than thirty American cities in the summer of 1919, named by James Weldon Johnson; it was driven in part by postwar labor competition and hostility toward Black veterans.
72. Tulsa Race Massacre (1921). A white mob attack on the affluent Black Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, often called “Black Wall Street”; more than 1,200 homes were burned and nearly 200 businesses destroyed, leaving roughly 10,000 people homeless.
73. W.E.B. Du Bois. The sociologist, activist, and cofounder of the NAACP whose book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) introduced the concepts of “double consciousness” and “the color line”; he is considered the father of modern pan-Africanism.
74. Double consciousness. Du Bois’s term for the internal conflict experienced by African Americans who see themselves both through their own eyes and through the racist lens of a society that denies their full humanity.
75. The color line. Du Bois’s metaphor for the system of racial discrimination and segregation that persisted after slavery; he famously called it “the problem of the twentieth century.”
76. Booker T. Washington. The Tuskegee Institute founder whose 1895 “Atlanta Exposition Address” urged African Americans to prioritize vocational education and economic self-help over immediate political rights, positions Du Bois strongly opposed.
77. Anna Julia Cooper. The educator, scholar, and author of A Voice from the South (1892), who argued that the full inclusion of Black women was essential to the progress of the race and the nation; her work helped define the turn-of-the-century ideology of racial uplift (“lifting as we climb”) associated with the National Association of Colored Women.
78. “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song written by James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1900, widely known as the Black National Anthem.
79. Madam C.J. Walker. The entrepreneur widely regarded as one of the first self-made female millionaires in the United States, who built a beauty products empire that celebrated Black beauty and funded extensive philanthropy.
80. African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Founded in 1816, the first Black Christian denomination in the United States; Black churches like the AME provided a base for community organizing, education, and political leadership.
81. HBCUs. Historically Black Colleges and Universities, most founded after the Civil War to educate African Americans excluded from other institutions; Wilberforce University (Ohio, 1856) was the first fully owned and operated by African Americans, and the Second Morrill Act (1890) led to the founding of nineteen additional land-grant HBCUs.
82. Harlem Renaissance. The flourishing of Black literary, artistic, and intellectual life centered in 1920s and 1930s Harlem; key figures included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Claude McKay.
83. New Negro movement. The broader cultural and political movement, named by Alain Locke in his 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, that celebrated Black creativity, pride, and self-definition and encompassed the Harlem Renaissance.
84. Carter G. Woodson. The historian who founded what became the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), created Negro History Week in 1926 (the forerunner of Black History Month), and authored The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933).
85. Arturo Schomburg. The Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile whose vast personal collection of diasporic artifacts became the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
86. Great Migration. The massive relocation of roughly six million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, Midwest, and West between the 1910s and 1970s, driven by Jim Crow violence and the promise of industrial jobs.
87. Afro-Caribbean migration. The movement of more than 140,000 people from the Caribbean to the United States between 1899 and 1937, driven by declining Caribbean economies and expanding U.S. influence in the region; prominent figures included Marcus Garvey (Jamaica), Claude McKay (Jamaica), and Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rico), whose activism and scholarship helped radicalize Black political thought in the early twentieth century.
88. Marcus Garvey. The Jamaican-born leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, whose “Back-to-Africa” movement and Black Star Line shipping company built the largest pan-African organization in African American history.
89. Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The Garvey-led pan-African organization that promoted Black self-determination, economic independence, and solidarity across the diaspora; its red, black, and green flag remains a global symbol of Black liberation.

Try a Harlem Renaissance Drill →

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Unit 4: Movements and Debates — 20–25%

90. Négritude. A political, cultural, and literary movement of the 1930s–1950s begun by French-speaking Caribbean and African writers (notably Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor) that protested colonialism and celebrated Black cultural identity; its Spanish-Caribbean counterpart, Negrismo, celebrated African contributions to Latin American music, folklore, literature, and art.
91. Pan-Africanism. The political and cultural philosophy that people of African descent worldwide share common interests and should unite for their collective liberation; W.E.B. Du Bois is considered its modern father, with roots in nineteenth-century figures like Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Blyden.
92. Year of Africa (1960). The landmark year in which seventeen African nations declared independence from European colonial rule; Ghana had led the way in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah.
93. Double V Campaign. The World War II–era call, launched by James G. Thompson in the Pittsburgh Courier (1942), for African Americans to fight for a “double victory” — over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home.
94. Tuskegee Airmen. The first African American pilots in the United States military, who flew combat missions for the Army Air Corps in Europe and North Africa during the Second World War.
95. G.I. Bill (1944). The law providing World War II veterans with college tuition, home mortgages, and business loans; though race-neutral on paper, local administration meant Black veterans received far fewer benefits in practice.
96. Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The unanimous Supreme Court decision that declared state-sanctioned school segregation unconstitutional, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson; the case drew on social-science evidence, including work associated with psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, to argue that segregation harmed Black children’s self-esteem.
97. Little Rock Nine. The nine Black students who in 1957 integrated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas under federal protection, one of the most iconic moments in the struggle to enforce Brown.
98. Redlining. The mid-twentieth-century practice of withholding mortgages from African Americans and other people of color in defined “hazardous” neighborhoods, reinforced by federal mapping (HOLC) and underwriting policies in the 1930s; the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited overt housing discrimination, though redlining’s effects and related discriminatory lending practices have persisted in various forms.
99. The “Big Four” civil rights organizations. The NAACP (founded 1909, focused on legal advocacy), CORE (founded 1942, pioneered Freedom Rides and sit-ins), SCLC (founded 1957, led by Martin Luther King Jr.), and SNCC (founded 1960, focused on grassroots youth organizing).
100. Martin Luther King Jr. The Baptist minister and SCLC president whose strategy of nonviolent direct action, rooted in Christian theology and Gandhian philosophy, helped lead the movement to major legislative victories and who delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
101. Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956). The 381-day boycott of segregated city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked by Rosa Parks’s arrest and organized through local Black churches and NAACP networks; it catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.
102. March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963). The massive Washington, D.C. rally of over 250,000 participants organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin to demand civil rights and economic justice; King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech there.
103. Ella Baker. The grassroots organizer known as the “mother of the Civil Rights movement,” who helped found SNCC in 1960 and consistently championed inclusive, group-centered leadership over charismatic top-down models.
104. Fannie Lou Hamer. The Mississippi sharecropper-turned-organizer whose testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party became a landmark moment of the Civil Rights movement.
105. Freedom Summer (1964). The voter-registration and Freedom Schools project in Mississippi that brought together Black and white volunteers; the murder of three activists that summer galvanized national support for civil rights legislation.

Try a Civil Rights Organizations Drill →

106. Civil Rights Act of 1964. The landmark federal law that outlawed segregation and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations and employment.
107. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The federal law that outlawed literacy tests and other discriminatory barriers to voting; its passage followed the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and led to a roughly sixfold increase in Black elected officials by the early 2000s.
108. Nation of Islam (NOI). The religious and political movement founded in Detroit in 1930 that blended Islamic beliefs with Black nationalist ideology; under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, it provided a base for Malcolm X’s early activism.
109. Malcolm X. The Muslim minister and activist who championed Black autonomy, self-defense, and pan-Africanism; after leaving the Nation of Islam and embracing orthodox Islam, he took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz before his 1965 assassination.
110. Black Power movement. The mid-1960s shift among many African Americans toward an emphasis on self-determination, cultural pride, and the right to armed self-defense, in response to the perceived limits of nonviolent integrationism.
111. Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The revolutionary organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland in 1966; its Ten-Point Program demanded housing, healthcare, education, and an end to police brutality, and it ran community survival programs including the Free Breakfast for School Children.
112. Black Arts Movement (BAM) (1965–1975). The cultural and political movement, led by figures such as Amiri Baraka, that treated Black art as a political tool for liberation and helped establish African American Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field.
113. Black Is Beautiful movement. The cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s that rejected Eurocentric beauty standards and celebrated Afrocentric aesthetics, including natural hairstyles, dashikis, and African head wraps.
114. Afrocentricity. The intellectual approach that places Africa and the achievements of people of African descent at the center of historical and cultural analysis; it informed curricula, holidays such as Kwanzaa (established 1966), and symbols like the Akan Sankofa bird.
115. Combahee River Collective. The Boston-based Black feminist and lesbian organization whose 1977 Collective Statement argued that the liberation of Black women would require the destruction of all interlocking systems of oppression; it took its name from Harriet Tubman’s Civil War raid.
116. Womanism. The term coined by writer Alice Walker in the 1980s for a Black feminist perspective that opposed both racism in mainstream feminism and sexism in Black communities.
117. Intersectionality. The framework introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 for understanding how race, gender, class, and other identities interact with systems of power to shape Black women’s distinct experiences; sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed a parallel concept of “interlocking systems of oppression.”
118. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Obama’s 2008 election made him the first Black president of the United States; Harris’s 2021 inauguration made her the first Black American (and first woman) to serve as vice president.
119. Hip-hop. The cultural movement born in the 1970s in the Bronx among young Black and Latino communities, encompassing MCing (rap), DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti art; it has since grown into a global phenomenon that voices ongoing Black political struggles.
120. Afrofuturism. The cultural and artistic movement that reimagines Black pasts, presents, and futures through speculative, technological, and liberatory frameworks; it animates works across music, film, literature, and visual art, including Black Panther and Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place.

Try a Black Feminism & Intersectionality Drill →

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How to Use This Glossary

Don’t try to memorize 120 terms in one sitting, and don’t just memorize definitions. For each term, ask yourself three questions: What unit does this belong to? Which of the four course themes (Migration and the African Diaspora, Intersections of Identity, Creativity and the Arts, Resistance and Resilience) does it connect to? And what other terms across other units does it link to? The exam consistently rewards students who can connect developments across time and space — for example, seeing how the kinship practices of the Kingdom of Kongo echo in the postemancipation family reunions of Reconstruction, or how the radical resistance of David Walker in 1829 anticipates the arguments of Malcolm X more than a century later.

A good rhythm is one unit per week, returning to earlier units as you add new ones. After you have worked through a unit’s terms, run the corresponding stimulus-based drills on the AP African American Studies practice page — that is where you will see these terms in the actual form the exam tests them, embedded in primary documents, literary excerpts, works of art, and data sources, with multiple-choice questions about sourcing, argument, and comparison.

Beyond content, the AP exam rewards mastery of historical and interdisciplinary thinking skills — source analysis, contextualization, comparison, causation, continuity and change, and argumentation — so practice applying these terms analytically, not just identifying them. When you are ready, pull a released document-based question from AP Central and try writing one under timed conditions using these terms as evidence.

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