The Practice of Freedom: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
36 flashcard terms for AP African American Studies Unit 3, 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.
Lincoln's wartime order freeing enslaved people in rebelling states; it reframed the war as a fight against slavery and opened Union enlistment to Black soldiers.
United States Colored Troops
Nearly 200,000 Black men served in the Union army and navy; their service became a powerful argument for citizenship — 'he has earned the right to citizenship,' Douglass argued.
Juneteenth
June 19, 1865 — the day Union troops announced emancipation in Galveston, Texas; celebrated since as a freedom holiday and made a federal holiday in 2021.
Reconstruction Amendments
13th (1865) abolished slavery except as punishment for crime; 14th (1868) established birthright citizenship and equal protection; 15th (1870) barred denying the vote by race.
Freedmen's Bureau
Federal agency (1865-1872) aiding the transition from slavery: negotiating labor contracts, opening schools and hospitals, and adjudicating disputes — chronically underfunded and opposed.
Black Reconstruction Politics
About 2,000 Black men held office during Reconstruction, including Senators Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce and Representative Robert Smalls — an unprecedented experiment in interracial democracy.
Robert Smalls
Enslaved pilot who commandeered the Confederate ship Planter to freedom in 1862, then served five terms in Congress from South Carolina.
Sharecropping
Post-emancipation labor system where families farmed landowners' plots for a crop share; debt at plantation stores routinely trapped croppers in cycles of peonage.
Convict Leasing
Southern states arrested Black men under vague 'Black Codes' and leased them to mines, farms, and railroads — forced labor the 13th Amendment's punishment clause permitted; described as 'slavery by another name.'
Black Codes
Laws passed by ex-Confederate states in 1865-66 restricting Black mobility, labor choice, and civil rights — vagrancy statutes made unemployment itself a crime.
Compromise of 1877
The bargain resolving the disputed 1876 election: Hayes took the presidency and federal troops left the South, abandoning Reconstruction and Black Southerners to 'Redeemer' rule.
Jim Crow
The legal and customary regime of racial segregation and disfranchisement built in the South from the 1880s, enforced by law, economic coercion, and terror.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Supreme Court decision blessing 'separate but equal' segregation; Justice Harlan's lone dissent insisted 'our Constitution is color-blind.'
Disfranchisement Tools
Poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, grandfather clauses, and white primaries stripped Black Southern men of the vote by the early 1900s — Louisiana's Black registration fell from 130,000 to under 1,500.
Lynching
Racial terror murders — over 4,000 documented in the South between 1877 and 1950 — used to enforce the racial order; often public spectacles that went unpunished.
Ida B. Wells
Journalist who documented lynching's real logic in Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record, showing it punished Black economic success and independence, not alleged crime; co-founded the NAACP.
Booker T. Washington
Founder of Tuskegee Institute; his 1895 Atlanta Exposition address accepted social separation while urging industrial education and economic self-help — the 'Atlanta Compromise.'
W. E. B. Du Bois
First Black Harvard PhD; The Souls of Black Folk (1903) answered Washington, demanding full civil rights and higher education for a 'Talented Tenth'; co-founded the NAACP and edited The Crisis.
Du Bois's concept of the 'two-ness' of being Black and American — 'two souls, two thoughts... in one dark body' — seeing oneself through the eyes of a contemptuous world.
The Veil
Du Bois's metaphor for the color line separating Black and white worlds, obscuring each from the other while giving Black Americans 'second-sight' into American society.
NAACP
Founded 1909 by Black and white activists including Du Bois and Wells; fought segregation through litigation, lobbying, and publicity — its Legal Defense strategy culminated in Brown v. Board (1954).
HBCUs
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Howard, Fisk, Spelman, Tuskegee, Morehouse) founded mostly after emancipation; engines of the Black professional class, scholarship, and activism.
Black Women's Club Movement
National Association of Colored Women (1896), motto 'Lifting as We Climb'; leaders like Mary Church Terrell built schools, kindergartens, and anti-lynching campaigns.
The Great Migration
Roughly six million Black Southerners moved to Northern and Western cities between 1910 and 1970, fleeing Jim Crow and seeking industrial work — transforming American politics, culture, and demography.
Chicago Defender
Black newspaper smuggled south by Pullman porters that urged migration north; its help-wanted ads and editorials made it an engine of the Great Migration.
The New Negro
Alain Locke's 1925 anthology and concept: a generation asserting self-respect, artistic ambition, and political assertiveness, refusing the deference demanded by Jim Crow.
Harlem Renaissance
1920s-30s flowering of Black literature, art, and music centered in Harlem: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, Duke Ellington.
Langston Hughes
Poet of Black vernacular life ('The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' 'I, Too') who fused jazz and blues rhythms with verse and insisted ordinary Black experience was worthy subject matter.
Zora Neale Hurston
Anthropologist and novelist (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937) who collected Southern Black folklore and wrote in dialect, celebrating rural Black culture on its own terms.
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Jamaican-born leader whose Universal Negro Improvement Association built the largest Black mass movement of the era — Black pride, economic independence (Black Star Line), and Pan-African 'Africa for the Africans.'
Pan-Africanism
The idea that African peoples worldwide share a common history and destiny and should unite; advanced by Du Bois's Pan-African Congresses and Garvey's movement alike.
Blues and Jazz
Musical forms born of Black Southern experience — blues from work songs and spirituals, jazz from New Orleans's creole mix — that became America's signature contributions to world music.
Black Church After Emancipation
Independent congregations multiplied rapidly after 1865, serving as schools, banks, political halls, and mutual aid centers — the institutional backbone of freed communities.
Nadir of Race Relations
Historians' term for roughly 1877-1920s: disfranchisement, segregation, peonage, and racial terror at their post-emancipation peak — the era Black institutions were built to survive.
Tulsa Race Massacre (1921)
White mob destroyed Greenwood, the prosperous 'Black Wall Street' of Tulsa — as many as 300 killed, 35 blocks burned — one of many early-20th-century massacres targeting Black success.
Practice of Freedom
Unit 3's through-line: after emancipation, Black Americans practiced freedom by building institutions — churches, schools, businesses, presses, and movements — against escalating repression.