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← African American Studies syllabus

United StatesAfrican American Studies

Unit 3: The Practice of Freedom

18 dot points across 18 inquiry questions. Click any dot point for a focused answer with worked past exam questions where available.

How did Afro-Caribbean migration enrich and reshape African American communities?

How did white Southerners use Black Codes and labor systems to limit Black freedom after slavery?

How did African Americans build the study of their own history, and why did it matter?

How did African Americans build organizations and institutions to advance freedom and fight for rights?

How did Southern states strip African Americans of the vote and impose legal segregation?

How did Harlem Renaissance poets imagine Africa and the African diaspora?

How did HBCUs, Black fraternities and sororities, and debates over education shape Black advancement?

How did racial uplift ideologies and Black women's leadership shape the struggle for advancement?

How did African Americans use photography to challenge stereotypes and document Black life?

How did freedpeople rebuild family and community life after emancipation, and what did the Freedmen's Bureau do?

How did African American performers in music, theater, and film assert artistry and challenge stereotypes?

What did W. E. B. Du Bois mean by the color line and double consciousness?

How and why did Reconstruction end, and what did its defeat mean for African Americans?

Why did millions of African Americans leave the South, and how did the Great Migration transform Black life?

What was the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, and why did they matter?

How did the Reconstruction Amendments redefine freedom and citizenship after slavery?

What was the UNIA, and how did Marcus Garvey shape Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism?

How was racial violence used to enforce white supremacy, and how did African Americans respond?