Topic 1.1 What Is African American Studies?: the features of the discipline, how the Black campus movement of the 1960s and 1970s established it, and how it enriches the study of early Africa and the diaspora.

What this topic is asking

Topic 1.1 opens the course by defining the field itself. The College Board wants you to be able to describe what makes African American Studies a distinct discipline, explain how it came to be taught in colleges and universities through the Black campus movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and explain why the field begins its story in early Africa rather than with slavery in the Americas.

The features of the discipline

Three features define the field as the CED presents it:

• It is interdisciplinary, drawing on many fields at once.
• It centers the experiences and perspectives of people of African descent, treating them as makers of history rather than only as its victims.
• It connects African Americans to a wider diaspora, the scattering of African peoples across the Atlantic world and beyond, and traces that story back to its origins on the African continent.

How the field was founded: the Black campus movement

African American Studies did not always exist in universities. It was won through activism. During the Black campus movement (roughly 1965 to 1972), Black students, joined by Latino, Asian, and white supporters, protested at over a thousand colleges and universities across the United States.

Their demands were concrete: the creation of Black Studies departments, the hiring of Black faculty and administrators, increased admission of Black students, and curricula that took Black history and culture seriously. The movement grew out of the broader Civil Rights and Black Power era, and it reflected a conviction that universities had ignored or distorted the Black past.

Why the course begins in Africa

A defining choice of the discipline, and of this course, is to begin not with slavery but with early Africa. This matters for two reasons.

First, it corrects older scholarship that treated Africa as a place without history. By studying the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, the Swahili Coast, and kingdoms such as Kongo, the field shows Africa as a center of trade, learning, and statecraft.

Second, it reframes the diaspora. If the story starts in flourishing African societies, then enslaved Africans are understood as people carrying knowledge, religion, languages, and skills into the Americas, not as people without a past.

Try this

Q1. What movement established African American Studies as a university discipline, and in roughly what years? [Recall]

• Cue. The Black campus movement, roughly 1965 to 1972, when Black students and allies protested at over a thousand colleges.

Q2. Explain why the course begins its study in early Africa rather than with slavery. [Short explanation]

• Cue. Beginning in early Africa treats the continent as a center of civilization with great empires and kingdoms, so the diaspora is understood as rooted in rich African societies and enslaved Africans are seen as carriers of knowledge and culture, not people without a past.