African Explorers in the Americas
This term referred to early sixteenth-century Africans familiar with Iberian culture who accompanied explorers.
What are ladinos?
Of the more than 12.5 million Africans transported across the Atlantic, only about 5 percent—≈388,000—landed here directly.
What is the United States?
This term describes the maritime voyage lasting up to three months that caused an estimated 15 percent mortality among captive Africans.
What is the Middle Passage?
This 1739 uprising in South Carolina, led by Jemmy, marched toward Spanish Florida seeking freedom.
What was the Stono Rebellion?
This 1677 law ensured a child’s status as free or enslaved followed that of the mother.
What is partus sequitur ventrem?
This “Atlantic creole” from the Kingdom of Kongo was the first known African to explore present-day Florida in 1513.
Who is Juan Garrido?
This South Carolina port received 48 percent of all Africans brought directly to what became the United States.
What is Charleston?
Slave-ship diagrams typically understate this by half, even though they were designed to maximize profit.
What is the number of captives?
In 1811, Charles Deslondes led this largest slave revolt on United States soil on the German Coast of Louisiana.
What is the German Coast Uprising?
This 1857 Supreme Court decision declared that African Americans, free or enslaved, could never be U.S. citizens.
What is Dred Scott v. Sandford?
This enslaved Moroccan healer served as translator and explorer in 1528 Texas before dying during Indigenous resistance.
Who was Estevanico (Esteban)?
These two African regions together supplied nearly half of the captives taken to mainland North America.
What are Senegambia and Angola?
These three brutal controls—nets, barricades, and guns—were added to ships to suppress this captive action.
What are revolts (or resistance attempts)?
This enslaved cook led a mutiny aboard the brig Creole in 1841, sailing it to freedom in the Bahamas.
Who was Madison Washington?
Enslaved people working under this system had individual daily quotas and less supervision, fostering languages like Gullah.
What is the task system?
Ladinos played these three roles in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century America: conquistadores, artisans, and this.
What are enslaved laborers?
These five European powers led the transatlantic slave trade: Portugal, Great Britain, France, Spain, and this nation.
What is the Netherlands?
In 1839, this Mende leader seized the schooner La Amistad and later won freedom in a two-year Supreme Court trial.
Who is Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué)?
These daily acts—breaking tools, stealing food, or working slowly—helped sustain the larger abolition movement from within.
What are “everyday” (or daily) forms of resistance?
These songs—also called “sorrow…”—combined African musical elements with biblical themes to communicate hope and secret escape plans.
What are spirituals (or jubilee songs)?
Spain’s name for the area including modern Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia where ladinos helped claim land.
What was La Florida?
This genre of writing, produced by formerly enslaved Africans, combined historical account, literature, and political text.
What are slave narratives?
Circulated by abolitionists, these images revealed the inhumane, cramped conditions aboard slave ships to spur antislavery activism.
What are slave-ship diagrams?
This network of clandestine routes and safe houses aided an estimated 30,000 enslaved people to freedom in North America, Canada, and Mexico.
What is the Underground Railroad?
Celebrated on June 19 each year, this holiday commemorates the reading of General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, and the end of legal slavery in the Confederacy.
What is Juneteenth?