TransferCredit.org Guide to AP® African American Studies

Unit 2 runs from the sixteenth century to 1865: from the first Africans in Spanish America, through the slave trade and the laws, labor and culture of slavery, to the Civil War and Juneteenth. It is the heaviest unit, and its main thread is resistance in every form, from shipboard revolts and maroon communities to slave narratives, emigration debates and the Underground Railroad.

Key terms, with examples

ladinos

Free and enslaved Africans familiar with Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) culture who joined Europeans' first explorations of the Americas, including the first Africans in the future United States.

Example: Africans in Spanish exploring parties helped Spain claim “La Florida,” an area that included Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.

scale of the transatlantic slave trade

Over 350 years (early 1500s to mid-1800s), more than 12.5 million Africans were forced to the Americas; only about 5 percent of survivors came straight to the U.S.

Example: Portugal, Great Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands were the top five enslaving nations; 48 percent of direct U.S. arrivals landed in Charleston.

shipboard resistance

Captives' resistance aboard slave ships: hunger strikes, attempts to jump overboard and revolts organized across language differences. It made the trade costlier and more dangerous and changed ship design.

Example: Captives who refused food were sometimes force-fed with iron instruments, yet hunger strikes continued.

slave auctions

Public sales of enslaved people, backed by the law and white supremacist doctrine. Those who resisted sale could be whipped, at times in front of their families and friends.

Example: In Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Solomon Northup described being sold to counter enslavers' claims that slavery was benign.

slave codes

Laws defining chattel slavery as race-based, inheritable and lifelong, restricting enslaved people's movement, gatherings, weapons and even fine fabrics; they hardened the color line.

Example: French colonies used the Code Noir, such as Louisiana's of 1724, and Spanish colonies the Código Negro.

African aesthetic traditions in crafts

African American art blending African, community, European and Indigenous influences: pottery, quilts used for storytelling and memory keeping, and instruments such as gourd rattles, banjos and drums.

Example: Storage Jar by David Drake, an enslaved potter, dates from 1858; a cream and red appliquéd quilted bedcover dates from about 1850.

Fort Mose

A fortified settlement set up by Spanish Florida's governor in 1738 under Francisco Menéndez, a once-enslaved Senegambian; the first sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States.

Example: Refugees fleeing the Carolinas and Georgia reached St. Augustine, where Spanish Florida offered freedom to those who converted to Catholicism.

mutual-aid societies

Organizations through which free Black people pooled resources to fund Black schools, businesses and independent churches and to support Black writers and speakers.

Example: Free Black communities in Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans built such institutions; by 1860 free people were 12 percent of the Black population.

maroon communities

Free communities of Afro-descendants who escaped slavery (maroons) and those born free there, often in remote, hidden places; some lasted a few years, others a century.

Example: African Americans formed maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp, between Virginia and North Carolina, and within Indigenous communities.

emigrationism

The nineteenth-century view that African Americans should build new communities in Latin America, the Caribbean or West Africa as an alternative to slavery and racial discrimination.

Example: In 1815 Paul Cuffee took 39 African Americans to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the first relocation of African Americans to Africa.

Underground Railroad

A covert network of Black and white abolitionists who gave transportation, shelter and other help to people fleeing slavery in the South to reach the North, Canada and Mexico.

Example: A family hiding freedom seekers in a cellar and guiding them north at night was part of the network.

photography and Black self-representation

Nineteenth-century African American leaders used photography, a new technology, to counter stereotypes by portraying themselves as citizens worthy of dignity, respect and equal rights.

Example: Sojourner Truth sold her cartes de visite, small photo cards, to raise money for the abolitionist cause.

What this area covers

Key people

How the exam asks it

Most sets give you a short primary source from this era, often a narrative, poem, law, petition or speech from the required list, and ask what it shows and why it was written, then move to related content. Know each required source's author, date and purpose, link each law to the resistance that prompted it, and keep the forms of resistance apart: everyday acts, shipboard and plantation revolts, maroon communities, freedom suits, emigration, the Underground Railroad and calls to rise up.

Common traps

Trap 1. Only about 5 percent of the Africans who survived the crossing came directly to what became the United States; about half landed in Brazil. Don't assume most captives came to North America.

Trap 2. Maroon wars were not slave revolts. Maroons were already free and fought colonial governments to protect their own communities.

Trap 3. Black–Indigenous relations were not one story: the Seminoles welcomed maroons as kin, but the five large Indigenous nations also enslaved African Americans and adopted slave codes.

Memory trick

The three-part journey is March, Middle, Market: the march to the coast, the Middle Passage, then quarantine and resale inland.

Gang = Group under an overseer; Task = a daily Target for each person.