AP African American Studies Resource Archive | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

A wood sculpture, painted black, in the form of a standing female figure with arms at sides apart from torso, hands on hips, and feet and legs apart; on her head there is a double-ax motif.

Yorùbá Oshe Shango Ceremonial Wand

19th or 20th Century

View this contemporary piece honoring a traditional Yoruba god.

Work of Art

An engraving showing two dozen armed Black men in the foreground hidden along a forested path and hillside watching a group of White men in military dress coming down the path in the distance

“The Maroons in Ambush . . . in Jamaica”

1801

View this depiction of a maroon revolt in Jamaica.

Work of Art

Three young Black men wearing tracksuits and white gloves dancing as another young Black man inverts his body on a piece of cardboard. Behind them is a graffitied wall.

Breakdancers in New York

1984

View an example of b-boy culture from 1980s New York.

Primary Source

A dark abstract painting of a mask with horns

“Les Fétiches”

1938

View Loïs Mailou Jones’s painting, which brought Négritude from literature to art.

Work of Art

A black-and-white photograph of Marcus Garvey, a Black man wearing a dark suit, light-colored vest, white shirt, and dark tie, sitting in a wooden chair next to a desk filled with papers, holding a handkerchief in his right hand and a gavel in his left.

Marcus Garvey at His Desk

1924

View this photograph of Marcus Garvey, the founder and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Primary Source

A printed certificate with names, date, and location written in

Land Order for Richard Brown

1865

View an example of the short-lived promise of “forty acres and a mule.”

Primary Source

A handwritten copy of the Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments

1865, 1868, and 1870

Read the three Reconstruction Amendments.

Primary Source

A black-and-white engraving of Solomon Northup, a Black man wearing a white hat, shirt, and pants, sitting on a box, a broomstick leaning against his left arm. Below the image, the name Solomon Northup in handwriting and the words "In his plantation suit"

Solomon Northup Remembers the New Orleans Slave Market

1853

Read an excerpt from Northup’s autobiographical account, Twelve Years a Slave.

Primary Source

A handwritten diary entry in cursive

The Capture of Black Seminoles

1836

Read Gen. Thomas Jesup’s diary entries from the Second Seminole War.

Primary Source

An engraving of a stately building with a rotunda topped with a Haitian flag

“Lecture on Haiti”

1893

Read an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s lecture on the importance of Haiti in the abolition of slavery.

Primary Source

An engraving of President Thomas Jefferson, a White man with white hair, wearing a white shirt and dark jacket.

Virginia Asks to Send Rebels to Sierra Leone

1802

Read an outline by Thomas Jefferson for a plan to send rebellious enslaved people to Sierra Leone in Africa.

Primary Source

The title of The Christian Recorder newspaper

A Mother Searching for Her Children

1866

View this newspaper advertisement placed by a mother who was sold away from her family.

Primary Source