African History before the Slave Trade
This African region, just south of the Sahara desert, was home to many powerful medieval kingdoms as it was rich in resources and had access to trans-Saharan trade networks.
Sahel
This is the name given to the type of slavery practiced in the United States. It offers enslaved people no rights of any kind, even over their own children.
Chattel slavery
This amendment to the Constitution provides equal protection under the law, applied the Bill of Rights to state governments, and gives citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
14th Amendment
This practice denied African Americans and other minority groups from obtaining subsidized mortgages. It led to segregation and economic inequities still being felt today.
Redlining
The nation watched in horror as Sheriff Bull Connor used attack dogs and water hoses against peaceful youth protestors during what 1963 event?
The Birmingham Campaign (Children's Crusade)
Many sub-Saharan languages come from the same language family. This is due to what historic phenomena that lasted over many centuries?
Bantu Migration
Free Northern Black communities formed these organizations in order to provide services like medical care, education, pension benefits, and others. Philadelphia's Free African Society became the first of these in 1787.
Mutual aid societies
In an act of religious syncretism, many enslaved African Americans blended Christianity with African spiritual practices. Historians often refer to this phenomenon as the...
Invisible church
Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) proposed the creation of a shipping line to transport goods, and eventually migrants, across the African diaspora. What was this shipping line called?
The Black Star Line
Malcolm X and other Black Power advocates preached this idea, which advocated for Black self-sufficiency, racial pride, and separatism. It has roots in the 19th Century with thinkers like Martin Delaney.
Black nationalism
This kingdom on the southern Nile had a complex relationship with its northern neighbor, Egypt. They were close trading partners but also fought frequently.
Kush (Nubia)
Enslaved African Americans were offered freedom if they fought for the British in the Revolutionary War. This promise was made by...
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation
This notorious 1850 law undercuts the Confederate argument that Southern states were more concerned with "states' rights" than with slavery.
Fugitive Slave Act
Booker T. Washington stressed Black uplift and accomodationism in which famous speech delivered in 1895?
Atlanta Compromise
Tensions between SNCC and SCLC organizers, as well as a lack of clearly articulated goals, made this event perhaps the biggest failure of the Civil Rights Movement.
Albany Campaign
Not much is known about this group from what is now Nigeria. Much of what we know about them is a result of the intricate sculptures left behind of people with exaggerated facial features and ornate jewelry.
Nok
During the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many slave trading forts were built just off the West African coast and functioned like prisons. The earliest of these was built off the coast of Ghana and was called...
Elmina Castle
Abolitionists won a major victory in this 1841 Supreme Court case that freed enslaved men who had staged a mutiny onboard a Spanish ship and were later captured by the US Navy.
The Amistad case
What is the name given to African Americans who left the South for Kansas during and after Reconstruction in a sort of "preview" of the Great Migration?
Exodusters
This location in rural Tennessee became a sort of interracial training center for activists in the Civil Rights Movement including Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and even Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of the Freedom Songs associated with the movement were also written here.
Highlander Folk School
This West African kingdom was ruled by aseries of kings called obas. Like most other West African states, power was derived from kinship networks.
Benin
What 1739 event led to harsher slave codes across the colonies in order to ensure something of the sort never occurred again.
Stono Rebellion
Former slaves began working for the Union army as contraband of war under what program? They were paid wages, organized their own time and labor, and some even bought land. It served as a model for the transition from slavery to freedom.
Port Royal Experiment
What is the name of the Black arts movement that exploded across the French-speaking world at the same time that the Harlem Renaissance was taking off in the United States?
Négritude
What 1984 law ballooned the number of America's incarcerated people to the point that the federal government began looking to private prison corporations to house all of the country's inmates?
Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984