Free AP® African American Studies Practice Test (2026)

Question 1

The Bantu expansion, which began several thousand years ago, is best described as

Accepted Answer

the slow spread of farmers and ironworkers speaking related languages across central, eastern and southern Africa

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a series of military campaigns in which the Kingdom of Aksum conquered the Nile Valley and much of the Red Sea coast

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the arrival of Arabic-speaking merchants who founded trading towns all along the East African coast

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a forced movement of West African captives northward across the Sahara to the markets of North Africa

Question 2

In the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage refers to

Accepted Answer

the forced voyage of captives across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas

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the forced march of captives from the African interior to forts on the coast

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the domestic slave trade that moved enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South

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the network of escape routes that led north from the slave states to Canada

Question 3

Which constitutional amendment overturned the Dred Scott ruling on citizenship by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens?

Accepted Answer

The Fourteenth Amendment

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The Thirteenth Amendment

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The Fifteenth Amendment

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The Nineteenth Amendment

Question 4

Which federal law, passed months after the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, suspended literacy tests and allowed federal examiners to register voters in Southern counties?

Accepted Answer

The Voting Rights Act

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The Civil Rights Act

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The Fair Housing Act

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The Twenty-fourth Amendment

Question 5

In the 300s CE, King Ezana made Christianity the official religion of which African kingdom, a Red Sea trading power that minted its own coins?

Accepted Answer

Aksum

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Kush (Nubia)

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Kongo

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Mali

Question 6

Of the more than 12 million Africans forced onto slave ships bound for the Americas, about what share were taken directly to the territory that became the United States?

Accepted Answer

Under 5 percent

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About 25 percent

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About 50 percent

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About 75 percent

Question 7

The case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) arose from a challenge to which kind of law?

Accepted Answer

A Louisiana law requiring separate railway cars for Black and white passengers

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A Kansas law allowing separate public elementary schools for Black and white children

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An Alabama city ordinance requiring separate seating on public buses

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A Mississippi law requiring voters to pass a literacy test

Question 8

Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 is historically significant mainly because it

Accepted Answer

spread knowledge of Mali's great wealth in gold across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe

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brought Islam to West Africa for the first time and converted Mali's rulers and merchants to it

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opened the first direct sea trade between Mali and the kingdom of Portugal

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ended Mali's reliance on caravan trade across the Sahara for its supplies of salt and copper

Question 9

The Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina was led by enslaved Africans who marched south, hoping to reach

Accepted Answer

Spanish Florida, where Spain offered freedom to people escaping British colonies

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Haiti, where enslaved people had overthrown French rule and founded a free republic

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Mexico, whose government had abolished slavery and welcomed people fleeing it

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Canada, where British law had ended slavery and protected those who arrived

Question 10

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, became known both for armed patrols that monitored police and for

Accepted Answer

community programs such as free breakfasts for children

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leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963

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organizing the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott

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founding the Nation of Islam in Detroit

Question 11

In his 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, Booker T. Washington urged Black Southerners to

Accepted Answer

focus on vocational training and economic progress while accepting segregation for now

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demand full voting rights and higher education at once, led by a college-educated elite

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leave the United States and build an independent Black nation of their own in West Africa

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form armed self-defense groups to protect their communities from white mobs

Question 12

Which combination best describes the Swahili Coast city-states, such as Kilwa and Mombasa, between about the 11th and 15th centuries?

Accepted Answer

A Bantu-based language with many Arabic loanwords, widespread Islam, and Indian Ocean trade

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A Christian kingdom ruled from a highland capital in the interior that traded mainly across the Red Sea

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Gold-mining towns governed by Mali and linked to it by caravans across the Sahara

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Portuguese trading forts whose residents had mostly converted to Catholicism

Question 13

Which was a consequence of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) outside Haiti?

Accepted Answer

France, having lost its most profitable colony, sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States

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The United States immediately recognized Haiti's independence and opened an embassy in its new capital

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Britain freed all of the enslaved people in its Caribbean colonies in the same year

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Spain abolished slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico to prevent a similar uprising

Question 14

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that

Accepted Answer

people of African descent were not U.S. citizens, and Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories

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an enslaved person became free automatically as soon as an enslaver brought him or her to live in a free state

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the transatlantic slave trade had to end within twenty years of the Court's decision

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free Black men could vote in federal elections even where state law barred them from voting

Question 15

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) argued that Black women face

Accepted Answer

interlocking oppressions of race, gender, class and sexuality that must be fought together

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discrimination that is mainly economic, so that reforms in the workplace alone would end it

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problems that the mainstream feminist movement of the 1960s had already fully addressed

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oppression based on gender that should be taken up only after racial equality is won

Question 16

W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the idea of "double consciousness," the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that holds one in contempt, in which work?

Accepted Answer

The Souls of Black Folk

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Up from Slavery

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A Voice from the South

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The Mis-Education of the Negro

Question 17

Which statement best describes the Kingdom of Kongo's adoption of Catholicism beginning in 1491?

Accepted Answer

Kongo's rulers chose it, and it blended with local beliefs into a distinct African Catholicism

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Portugal imposed it on Kongo after its soldiers conquered the kingdom's capital by force

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It kept Kongo entirely out of the Atlantic slave trade for the next two hundred years

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It replaced Islam, which Kongo's kings had made the official religion of the kingdom in the 1200s

Question 18

Virginia's 1662 law based on the principle of partus sequitur ventrem established that

Accepted Answer

a child's status as enslaved or free followed the status of the mother

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a child's status followed the status of the father, as in English common law

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an enslaved person who was baptized as a Christian became free

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enslaved people could buy their freedom after a fixed term of service

Question 19

Which pair of factors best explains why large numbers of Black Southerners moved to Northern cities during and after World War I?

Accepted Answer

Jim Crow laws and racial violence in the South, and war-industry jobs in the North

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Free land offered by Reconstruction programs and the end of sharecropping in the South

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A Supreme Court ban on segregation and new voting rights for Black Southerners

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Federal relocation programs and the closing of factories across the Southern states

Question 20

In the 1930s, maps made for the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation marked many Black neighborhoods as "hazardous" and colored them red. What was a long-term effect of this redlining?

Accepted Answer

Residents struggled to get mortgages, which limited homeownership and widened the wealth gap

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Property values in those neighborhoods rose faster than in the new suburbs around them

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Banks were required by federal law to offer residents of those neighborhoods lower interest rates

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Those neighborhoods received extra federal funding to build new owner-occupied housing

Question 21

In the Mande societies of West Africa, griots (jeli) were best known as

Accepted Answer

hereditary oral historians and musicians who kept genealogies and epics such as the story of Sundiata

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royal officials who collected taxes on all of the gold and salt passing through the empire's trade towns

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Islamic scholars who trained judges and copied manuscripts in the mosques of Timbuktu

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cavalry commanders who led Mali's armies and then governed the provinces they conquered

Question 22

David Walker's Appeal (1829) is best known for

Accepted Answer

urging enslaved people to resist, by force if needed, and attacking African colonization schemes

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telling the story of its author's own escape from slavery on a Maryland plantation

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arguing that moral persuasion alone would eventually lead enslavers to free the people they held

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urging free Black Americans to emigrate and build a new nation in Liberia

Question 23

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) is best known for

Accepted Answer

promoting Black pride, economic self-reliance and pan-African unity, including a shipping line

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winning court cases against segregated schools and universities through a team of civil rights lawyers

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founding Tuskegee Institute to give Black students industrial and agricultural training

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organizing the Montgomery bus boycott through local churches and women's groups

Question 24

During the Civil War, many Black Union soldiers, including men of the 54th Massachusetts, refused their wages for months to protest that

Accepted Answer

they were paid less than white soldiers of the same rank

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they were barred from serving in any of the army's combat units

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they had to enlist for life rather than for three years

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they could serve only under Black officers

Question 25

The NAACP's lawyers in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) cited studies by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. What did the Clarks' doll tests suggest?

Accepted Answer

Segregation harmed Black children's self-esteem, since many preferred the white dolls

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Black and white children learned equally well when taught in separate schools

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Young children did not notice racial differences at all until they reached their teens

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Integrated schools would lower the test scores of white students

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