Key people, events, and concepts from African origins through contemporary issues · Updated for 2026
| Topic | Key Facts |
|---|---|
| Origins of enslaved Africans | Majority from West & West-Central Africa — Senegambia, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, Kongo-Angola; distinct cultures, languages, religions brought to Americas |
| Major African Kingdoms | Ghana (wealth from gold/salt trade); Mali (Mansa Musa, Timbuktu scholarship, 1324 pilgrimage); Songhai; Kongo; Benin (bronze art); Ashanti; Great Zimbabwe |
| Transatlantic Slave Trade | ~12.5 million Africans transported (1500s–1860s); ~1.8 million died in Middle Passage (~10–20% mortality); peak: 18th century; Portugal, Britain, France, Netherlands, USA all participated |
| Middle Passage | Ocean voyage from Africa to Americas; horrific conditions — chained below deck, disease (dysentery, scurvy), starvation; resistance through suicide, mutiny (Amistad, 1839) |
| Triangular Trade | Manufactured goods → Africa → enslaved people → Americas → raw materials (sugar, tobacco, cotton) → Europe; economic foundation of Atlantic economy |
| Concept/Event | Significance |
|---|---|
| 1619 — First Africans in English colonies | ~20 Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, as bound servants; precursor to codified race-based slavery |
| Partus sequitur ventrem (1662 VA) | Child's status follows the mother — enslaved if mother enslaved; allowed slaveholders to profit from enslaved women's children, even their own |
| Codified racial slavery | 1670s Virginia laws tied slavery permanently to race (Bacon's Rebellion, 1676, accelerated this shift); lifetime hereditary enslavement of Africans and their descendants |
| Domestic slave trade | After 1808 ban on international slave trade, ~1 million enslaved people sold domestically; separated families; most domestic trade led from Upper South to Deep South cotton fields |
| Sharecropping | Post-slavery labor system — formerly enslaved people farmed land owned by whites, owed portion of crop; debt peonage kept many in near-slavery conditions through Jim Crow era |
| Topic | Key Points |
|---|---|
| Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) | 'Separate but equal' doctrine; upheld for 58 years; dissent by Justice Harlan: 'Constitution is color-blind' |
| Lynching | ~4,000+ recorded 1877–1950; tool of racial terror; Ida B. Wells documented its false justifications (1890s) |
| Disenfranchisement | Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, white primaries stripped Black voting rights by 1900 |
| Booker T. Washington | Tuskegee Institute; 'Atlanta Compromise' (1895) — accept social segregation, focus on economic self-sufficiency; criticized by Du Bois |
| W.E.B. Du Bois | Souls of Black Folk (1903); double consciousness; Niagara Movement (1905); co-founded NAACP (1909); demanded full civil rights now |
| NAACP (1909) | Legal challenges to segregation; Thurgood Marshall's legal strategy; led to Brown v. Board |
| Topic | Key Points |
|---|---|
| Great Migration (1910–1970) | ~6 million Black Southerners moved North/West; push: Jim Crow, boll weevil, violence; pull: industrial jobs, political rights |
| Harlem Renaissance (1920s–30s) | Cultural explosion in Harlem; Langston Hughes (poetry), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Duke Ellington (jazz), Alain Locke (The New Negro) |
| Marcus Garvey / UNIA | Pan-African nationalism; Black Star Line; 'Back to Africa'; millions of followers; clashed with Du Bois; deported 1927 |
| New Negro | Post-WWI Black identity — assertive, proud, demanding rights; contrasted with submissive stereotype |
| Jazz & Blues | Blues (Delta origins) → jazz (New Orleans → Chicago → NYC); both African American art forms that transformed global culture |
| Event/Person | Year | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Brown v. Board of Education | 1954 | Overturned Plessy; school segregation unconstitutional; NAACP/Thurgood Marshall victory |
| Emmett Till murder | 1955 | 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi; open casket galvanized civil rights movement nationally |
| Montgomery Bus Boycott | 1955–56 | Rosa Parks arrest; 381-day boycott; Dr. King to national prominence; buses desegregated |
| Little Rock Nine | 1957 | Integration of Central High; Eisenhower sent federal troops; showed federal enforcement needed |
| Greensboro Sit-ins / SNCC | 1960 | Student sit-ins at Woolworth's; SNCC founded; direct-action nonviolent resistance spreads |
| Freedom Rides | 1961 | CORE/SNCC riders challenged interstate bus segregation; violent attacks in Alabama |
| March on Washington | 1963 | 250,000 attendees; King's "I Have a Dream" speech; pressure for Civil Rights Act |
| Civil Rights Act (1964) | 1964 | Banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment; prohibited racial discrimination by programs receiving federal funds |
| Freedom Summer / COFO | 1964 | Mississippi voter registration; murders of Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner; exposed violent resistance |
| Selma / Bloody Sunday | 1965 | March 7 attack on marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge; televised; led directly to Voting Rights Act |
| Voting Rights Act (1965) | 1965 | Banned literacy tests; federal oversight (preclearance); dramatic Black voter registration increase |
| Fair Housing Act (1968) | 1968 | Banned housing discrimination; passed after King's assassination; weakly enforced |
| Concept | Thinker/Source | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Double Consciousness | W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) | Black Americans see themselves both through their own eyes and through the eyes of a white society that diminishes them |
| Pan-Africanism | Garvey, Du Bois, Nkrumah | Unity of African peoples across the diaspora; Africa as spiritual/political home |
| Intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) | Multiple systems of oppression (race, gender, class, sexuality) overlap and interact |
| Rememory | Toni Morrison, Beloved | Traumatic history persists and haunts the present; slavery's psychological legacy |
| New Jim Crow | Michelle Alexander (2010) | Mass incarceration as racial control system following end of Jim Crow |
| Afrocentrism | Molefi Asante | Centering African and African American experience and knowledge in scholarship |
| Issue | Key Facts & Context |
|---|---|
| Mass incarceration | War on Drugs (Nixon 1971; Reagan 1980s); Black men imprisoned at ~5x white rate; 2.3 million incarcerated in US (world's highest); felony disenfranchisement |
| Racial wealth gap | Median white family ~8x wealth of median Black family; legacy of redlining, GI Bill exclusion, discriminatory lending, and enslaved labor's uncompensated wealth extraction |
| Redlining | HOLC (1930s) maps marked Black neighborhoods as high-risk; banks denied mortgages; neighborhoods disinvested; effects visible in wealth disparities today |
| Black Lives Matter (2013) | Founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi after Trayvon Martin acquittal; centers police violence; decentralized; intersectional; global network by 2020 |
| Obama presidency (2009–2017) | First Black president; symbolism vs. structural change debate; record obstruction; post-racial narrative challenged by persistent racial disparities |
| Reparations debate | HR 40 (study commission, since 1989); Ta-Nehisi Coates 'The Case for Reparations' (2014 Atlantic); connects historical wealth extraction to present racial wealth gap; Evanston, IL first US reparations program (2021) |