Movements and Debates: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
36 flashcard terms for AP African American Studies Unit 4, 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.
Scholars' framing that the freedom struggle stretches from 1930s labor and legal organizing through the 1970s and beyond, rather than beginning suddenly in 1954.
A. Philip Randolph
Organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; his threatened 1941 March on Washington won Executive Order 8802 banning defense-industry discrimination, and he chaired the 1963 March.
Double V Campaign
World War II-era campaign launched by the Pittsburgh Courier for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home — linking the war's ideals to domestic justice.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
NAACP Legal Defense Fund victory, argued by Thurgood Marshall, holding school segregation unconstitutional — 'separate educational facilities are inherently unequal' — overturning Plessy in education.
Emmett Till (1955)
14-year-old Chicagoan lynched in Mississippi; his mother Mamie Till-Mobley's open-casket funeral and Jet magazine's photos galvanized a generation of activists.
Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)
381-day boycott sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest and organized through churches and the Women's Political Council under Jo Ann Robinson; it introduced Martin Luther King Jr. and won Browder v. Gayle.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Baptist minister who fused Christian love-ethic with Gandhian nonviolent direct action; led SCLC, wrote 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' (1963), and framed the movement's moral case to the nation.
Nonviolent Direct Action
Strategy of deliberately confronting injustice — sit-ins, marches, boycotts, freedom rides — to 'create such a crisis' that a community must negotiate, as King explained from Birmingham jail.
SNCC
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, born of the 1960 sit-ins with Ella Baker's guidance; ran freedom rides, voter registration, and Mississippi Freedom Summer with a grassroots, group-centered ethos.
Ella Baker
Organizer behind the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC who championed participatory democracy: 'strong people don't need strong leaders' — mentoring young activists rather than commanding them.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Mississippi sharecropper turned SNCC organizer, beaten for registering voters; her 1964 televised testimony for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party — 'I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired' — shamed the nation.
Birmingham Campaign (1963)
SCLC confrontation with Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses; televised brutality against children marchers pushed Kennedy to propose the civil rights bill.
March on Washington (1963)
250,000 people rallied for 'Jobs and Freedom'; organized by Randolph and Bayard Rustin; site of King's 'I Have a Dream' — its economic demands are often forgotten.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and federally funded programs; Title VII created the EEOC — the era's broadest antidiscrimination statute.
Selma and the Voting Rights Act (1965)
After Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and imposed federal oversight; Black Southern registration soared within a decade.
Malcolm X
Nation of Islam minister turned independent leader who preached Black self-defense, self-determination, and internationalism; 'The Ballot or the Bullet' (1964); assassinated 1965; his Autobiography remains canonical.
Nation of Islam
Religious-nationalist movement under Elijah Muhammad preaching Black separatism, discipline, and economic independence; its most famous ministers were Malcolm X and later Louis Farrakhan.
Black Power
Slogan raised by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in 1966 calling for Black political control, cultural pride, and self-determination — a shift from integrationist framing after years of violent white resistance.
Founded 1966 in Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; armed police patrols plus 'survival programs' — free breakfast for children, health clinics, sickle-cell testing — under a Ten-Point Program.
COINTELPRO
FBI counterintelligence program that surveilled, infiltrated, and disrupted Black organizations from the SCLC to the Panthers; exposed in 1971, condemned by the Church Committee.
Black Arts Movement
1965-75 cultural wing of Black Power — Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks's later work — art by, for, and about Black people; 'Black is beautiful.'
Black Is Beautiful
Cultural movement reclaiming African features, natural hair, and dark skin against centuries of European beauty standards — expressed in the Afro, dashikis, and arts of the era.
Black Feminism
Tradition insisting race, gender, and class oppression must be fought together; rooted in figures from Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper to the Combahee River Collective.
Combahee River Collective (1977)
Black lesbian feminist group whose statement argued that Black women's liberation would require ending all systems of oppression — 'if Black women were free... everyone else would have to be free.'
Intersectionality
Kimberle Crenshaw's 1989 term for how overlapping identities (race, gender, class) produce compound experiences of discrimination that single-axis analysis misses.
Audre Lorde
Self-described 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet' whose essays (Sister Outsider) theorized difference as a creative force: 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.'
Shirley Chisholm
First Black woman in Congress (1968) and first Black major-party presidential candidate (1972) — 'unbought and unbossed.'
Toni Morrison
Novelist (Beloved, Song of Solomon) and editor who centered Black interior life without translation for white readers; first Black woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).
Afrofuturism
Aesthetic imagining Black futures through science fiction, technology, and African cosmologies — Octavia Butler's novels, Sun Ra's cosmic jazz, Janelle Monae, Black Panther (2018).
Hip-Hop
Born in the 1970s Bronx from DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti; became a global vehicle for Black expression, from party music to protest (Public Enemy, Kendrick Lamar).
Anti-Apartheid Solidarity
African American activists (TransAfrica, Free South Africa Movement) drove U.S. divestment and the 1986 sanctions over Reagan's veto — diaspora politics in action.
Mass Incarceration Debate
Scholars like Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow, 2010) argue the drug war and imprisonment boom function as a racialized system of control; a central contemporary debate in the field.
Black Lives Matter
Movement founded 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi after Trayvon Martin's killer's acquittal; decentralized organizing against police violence, peaking in the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Reparations Debate
Ongoing argument over redress for slavery and Jim Crow — from Callie House's pension movement to Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'The Case for Reparations' (2014) and H.R. 40 study proposals.
Movement Debates
Unit 4's core skill: comparing strategies — integration vs. self-determination, nonviolence vs. self-defense, courts vs. streets, single-axis vs. intersectional — as reasoned responses to shared oppression.
Faith and the Movement
Black religious traditions powered activism across the era — church-based organizing in the South, the Nation of Islam in cities, and prophetic preaching from King to contemporary faith leaders.