Black Beginnings
Religious Trappings
Reconstruction (and Beyond)
Overarching Themes
400

The year the first documented African slaves were brought to what is now America, in this class used as a proxy for the beginning of African-American history.

What is 1619?

400

He was perhaps best known as the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Philadelphia in 1794, the first independent Black church in America.

Who is Richard Allen?

400

The 1896 Supreme Court act commonly accepted to have enshrined Jim Crow segregation

What is Plessy v. Ferguson?

400

The process by which dominant groups (in our case, Europeans and their descendants) in power defined, assigned roles to, and constrained Black people and the Black experience throughout American history.

What is signification?

800

This British ship landed with cargo including enslaved people a year before the Mayflower, yet its history is nowhere near as common in early American stories.

What is the White Lion?

800

Submission to/belief in God, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage make up these.

What are the Five Pillars of Islam?

800

A time period of great upheaval, that led to the legal emancipation of all enslaved people through violent means, but forced newly freed people to fight for their own freedoms and belonging amidst a backlash.

What is the Civil War and Reconstruction?

800

The process by which Black people sought to reclaim their own identities, working to establish their own names, dignity, and experiences. 

What is self-signification?

1200

The overall process by which people from Africa were brought to the Americas and held there in bondage against their wills.

What is transatlantic slavery?

1200

An example of a slave/"Negro" spiritual that was sung by enslaved people while they worked, sometimes viewed as a coded means of resistance.

What is "Roll, Jordan, Roll?"

1200

This, enacted in 1870, prevented federal and state governments from discriminating against people based on race or previous condition of servitude when it came to voting rights.

What is the 15th Amendment?

1200

A modern Black consciousness promoting global unification, freedom, and empowerment of people of African descent in Africa and the Americas.

What is Pan-Africanism?

1600

This powerful Central African kingdom was an early convert to Christianity following contact with Portugal, and would become a key player in allying themselves with (at least some) Europeans and providing people for the slave trade from the 15th century onwards.

What is Kongo-Angola?

1600

Part of a religious tradition practiced almost exclusively in New Orleans and surrounding areas, some of the main points included a belief in karma and the idea that putting good into the world would yield good.

What are vodou themes?

1600

An organization, ran by the federal government, which was meant to provide aid, education, and a means of building wealth to those newly freed Black people in the wake of the Civil War.

What is the Freedmen's Bureau?

1600

According to V.P. Franklin, these included self-determination, education, freedom, resistance (to assimilation), Black unity and solidarity, and faith.

What are the core values of African Americans?