Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
36 flashcard terms for AP African American Studies Unit 2, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 18-question quiz — free, no account needed.
Forced migration of roughly 12.5 million Africans to the Americas between the 1500s and 1860s; about 10.7 million survived the crossing, the largest forced ocean migration in history.
Middle Passage
The Atlantic crossing endured by captives — weeks of confinement below decks with death rates near 15 percent; the middle leg of the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Brookes Diagram
1788 abolitionist print showing 454 captives packed into a slave ship's hold; one of the most reproduced propaganda images of the campaign against the trade.
Olaudah Equiano
Formerly enslaved author whose 1789 Interesting Narrative described capture, the Middle Passage, and self-purchase; a founding text of the slave narrative genre and abolitionist evidence.
Slave Ship Revolts
Captives rose up on roughly one in ten voyages; shipboard resistance (including the 1839 Amistad revolt) forced traders to add crew and weapons, raising the trade's costs.
Racial Slavery
A system, developed in the Americas, that made bondage lifelong, inheritable through the mother, and justified by invented racial hierarchy — distinct from earlier forms of servitude.
Partus Sequitur Ventrem
1662 Virginia law making a child's status follow the mother's; it made slavery heritable, incentivized sexual exploitation, and broke with English paternal-descent tradition.
Slave Codes
Colonial and state laws defining enslaved people as property, restricting movement, assembly, literacy, and self-defense, and shielding enslavers from prosecution for violence.
Chattel Principle
The legal treatment of human beings as movable property — bought, sold, mortgaged, inherited, and insured — which made family separation a constant structural threat.
Internal Slave Trade
After the 1808 ban on Atlantic imports, over one million enslaved people were sold from the Upper South to cotton frontiers of the Deep South, shattering families ('sold down the river').
Cotton Kingdom
After the cotton gin (1793), short-staple cotton exploded across the Deep South; by 1860 cotton was over half of U.S. exports and enslaved people were the nation's largest financial asset.
Task and Gang Systems
Two labor regimes: task (assigned daily quota, common in rice country, allowing some autonomous time) and gang (sunup-to-sundown supervised groups, typical of cotton and sugar).
Gullah Geechee
Culture and creole language of the Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry, where large majority-Black rice plantations preserved strong African linguistic and cultural continuities.
Slave Narratives
Autobiographies by the formerly enslaved (Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs) that documented slavery from within and armed the abolitionist movement with first-person evidence.
Frederick Douglass
Self-emancipated abolitionist, orator, and editor of the North Star; his 1845 Narrative and speeches like 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' (1852) indicted American hypocrisy.
Harriet Jacobs
Author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which exposed the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the 'loophole of retreat' — her seven years hidden in a garret.
Phillis Wheatley
Enslaved Boston poet whose 1773 book made her the first African American to publish a poetry volume — living proof against claims of Black intellectual inferiority.
Everyday Resistance
Tool-breaking, work slowdowns, feigned illness, truancy, and preserving forbidden knowledge — constant low-level defiance that contested enslavers' control short of open revolt.
South Carolina uprising led largely by Kongolese captives marching toward Spanish Florida; it prompted the harsh Negro Act of 1740 restricting assembly, movement, and literacy.
Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)
Enslaved people of Saint-Domingue defeated France and founded Haiti — the only successful slave revolution to create an independent nation; it inspired Black freedom struggles and terrified enslavers.
Toussaint Louverture
Formerly enslaved general who led the Haitian Revolution's armies and governed Saint-Domingue before being captured by Napoleon's forces; died in a French prison in 1803.
Louisiana Purchase Connection
Haiti's victory wrecked Napoleon's American ambitions, pushing France to sell Louisiana to the U.S. in 1803 — a direct geopolitical consequence of Black revolution.
Gabriel's Conspiracy (1800)
Blacksmith Gabriel planned an armed march on Richmond under the banner 'Death or Liberty'; betrayed by informants, he and about 25 others were executed.
German Coast Uprising (1811)
The largest slave revolt in U.S. history: several hundred armed people marched on New Orleans behind Charles Deslondes before militia suppression.
Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831)
Virginia revolt that killed about 55 white people; retaliation killed over a hundred Black people, and Southern states answered with harsher codes and literacy bans.
David Walker's Appeal (1829)
Radical pamphlet by a free Black Bostonian calling on the enslaved to resist by any means and indicting American Christianity's hypocrisy; the South banned it and put a price on his head.
Maroon Communities
Settlements of self-emancipated people — Jamaica's Windward and Leeward Maroons, Brazil's Palmares, the Great Dismal Swamp — that sustained autonomy and armed resistance for decades.
Palmares
Brazilian maroon state that endured most of the 17th century with thousands of residents; its last leader Zumbi remains a symbol of Black resistance in Brazil.
Underground Railroad
Clandestine network of routes, safe houses, and conductors helping freedom seekers escape north and to Canada; Harriet Tubman made about 13 armed rescue trips into Maryland.
Harriet Tubman
Escaped from Maryland slavery in 1849, then returned repeatedly to guide roughly 70 people out; later served the Union army as scout and spy, guiding the Combahee River raid that freed over 700.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Federal law compelling Northern citizens and officials to aid slave-catchers and denying accused fugitives a jury trial — it nationalized slavery's enforcement and radicalized Northern opinion.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Supreme Court ruling that Black people were not citizens and Congress could not ban slavery in the territories; it declared Black people had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'
Free Black Communities
By 1860 nearly half a million free Black people lived in the U.S., building churches, schools, and mutual aid societies while facing legal restrictions in both North and South.
African Methodist Episcopal Church
Independent Black denomination founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia (1816) after white congregations enforced segregated seating — an institutional base for education, abolition, and community life.
Negro Spirituals
Sacred songs blending African musical practice with Christianity; coded lyrics ('Wade in the Water,' 'Follow the Drinking Gourd') could carry double meanings of escape and deliverance.
Ring Shout
Counterclockwise sacred dance-worship tradition with African roots, practiced especially in the Lowcountry — evidence of African religious continuity within American Christianity.