From Chains to Change
This forced voyage across the Atlantic chained captive Africans in ship holds in spaces “the size of coffins”; up to a quarter died on longer voyages.
What is the Middle Passage?
Created by Congress in March 1865 and led by General Oliver Otis Howard, this federal agency gave out food and medical supplies, oversaw labor contracts, and helped found thousands of schools for freedpeople.
What is the Freedmen’s Bureau?
Spurred by World War I labor shortages in Northern industry, about six million African Americans left the South between about 1915 and the 1970s in this movement.
What is the Great Migration?
She was not an accidental protester. A seasoned NAACP secretary trained at the Highlander Folk School, she was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her Montgomery bus seat.
Who is Rosa Parks?
With her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, she became the first Black artist to win the Grammy for Best Country Album.
Who is Beyoncé?
Beginning in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, this uprising was the largest, most successful slave rebellion in history. It ended on January 1, 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the first independent Black state in the Western Hemisphere.
What is the Haitian Revolution?
Legal freedom and the knowledge of freedom were not the same thing. About 250,000 enslaved people in this state learned they were free only on June 19, 1865, when General Granger issued General Order No. 3.
What is Texas?
In his 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, this leader of Tuskegee Institute said that “in all things purely social” the races could be “as separate as the five fingers.”
Who is Booker T. Washington?
At Greenwood, Mississippi, during the 1966 March Against Fear, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael shouted this two-word slogan. He later explained that it meant group organization and community control, not hatred of white people.
What is “Black Power”?
Founded by Berry Gordy in Detroit in 1959, this record label gave the world The Supremes, The Temptations, and Stevie Wonder.
What is Motown?
Writing as “Linda Brent” in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she exposed the sexual abuse enslaved women faced. She also described hiding for seven years in a crawlspace above her grandmother’s porch.
Who is Harriet Jacobs?
After a white mob murdered three Black grocery owners in Memphis in 1892, this journalist used statistics in Southern Horrors and A Red Record. She showed that lynching punished Black economic success, not crimes.
Who is Ida B. Wells?
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois used this term for the inner split of African Americans living behind “the veil”: “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”
What is double consciousness?
A five-month strike at this California campus in 1968–69 was led by its Black Student Union and the multiracial Third World Liberation Front. It won the nation’s first autonomous, degree-granting Department of Black Studies.
What is San Francisco State?
At Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, he became the first solo rapper to headline the halftime show.
Who is Kendrick Lamar?
Frederick Douglass said this law meant “New York has become as Virginia.” It forced Northerners to help capture people who had escaped slavery, and it paid judges $10 to send a person into slavery but only $5 to declare them free.
What is the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850?
★ DAILY DOUBLE ★ Using the 13th Amendment’s exception for people convicted of crimes, Southern states rented mostly Black prisoners to railroads and mines. Companies paid no purchase price, so they had no reason to keep workers alive, and death rates in Alabama’s camps reached 20–45%.
What is convict leasing?
Countee Cullen hoped to be judged a “universal” poet. This writer disagreed: in his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he argued that Black artists should express their “individual dark-skinned selves” without seeking white approval.
Who is Langston Hughes?
Her principle that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” shaped the group-centered style of SNCC, founded at a 1960 Shaw University conference she organized. Decades later it shaped the decentralized networks of the Movement for Black Lives.
Who is Ella Baker?
In 1940, she became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award, for her role in Gone with the Wind.
Who is Hattie McDaniel?
Scholars like Ira Berlin distinguish “societies with slaves” from these. In places like the Chesapeake and South Carolina lowcountry, enslaved African labor became the foundation, and bondage dictated the entire political, economic, and social order.
What are slave societies?
In the early 1900s, a Black man in the Deep South pays his poll tax and passes the literacy test. He still has no say in who holds office, because the Democratic Party, claiming to be a private club, bars him from the only election that matters. He has been shut out by this device.
What is the white primary?
The NAACP fought in court, and the Harlem Renaissance sought progress through refined art. This Harlem-based organization instead reached working-class Black people directly with race pride, the Negro World newspaper, and the Black Star Line.
What is the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)?
A bank’s lending rules never mention race, yet they routinely shut out Black neighborhoods. In their 1967 book, Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton would call this not individual prejudice but this.
What is institutional racism?
Released in 1979, this group’s “Rapper’s Delight” became the first hip-hop single to crack the Billboard Top 40.
Who is the Sugarhill Gang?