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

Image of a Benjamin Banneker postal stamp featuring a portrait of Banneker with a smaller, full-body illustration of Banneker with a telescope in the foreground.

African American Scientists

with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Learn more about some of the most notable African American scientists and their discoveries, from Benjamin Banneker to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Video

A color photograph of a blue historical marker with yellow text for the Free African Society, in front of a gray stone building.

“Preamble and Articles of Association of Free African Society”

1787

Explore the founding document of Philadelphia's Free African Society, only the second Black mutual aid society in the country.

Primary Source

Drawing of various sections of the cicada.

Benjamin Banneker’s Study of the Cicada

1800

Read Banneker’s derivation of the seventeen-year cycle of the cicada, one of the first scientists to make this observation.

Primary Source

A black-and-white photogrpah of Fidel Castro (a dark-haired, bearded, light-skinned Latino man wearing a dark shirt and pants) and Malcolm X (a light-skinned Black man wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a dark trench coat, and a white shirt and dark tie) smiling while sitting on a bed in a hotel room.

Diasporic Solidarity and the Cuban Revolution

with Danielle Pilar Clealand

Learn more about the African American community’s response to the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s.

Video

A color photograph of a multicolored mural featuring images of crowds of protesters, Yuri Kochiyama (a Japanese American woman depicted wearing a red shirt and white bandana) speaking into a megaphone, and Malcolm X (a Black man depicted wearing a light-colored suit, blue shirt, and red tie and holding a newspaper). Above them is a depiction of Earth flanked by bridges.

Black and Latino Solidarity Movements

with Danielle Pilar Clealand

Learn more about Chicano, Puerto Rican, and other solidarity movements and their relation to the Black freedom struggle.

Video

Josiah Thomas Walls

ca. 1870

Explore another example of a Black elected official during Reconstruction.

Primary Source

A collage of portraits of Black and white men in suits and ties in seven rows.

Radical Members of the South Carolina Legislature

1872

View a composite portrait of Reconstruction-era elected officials.

Primary Source

A printed flyer for "THE BLACK ARTS PARADE!!," featuring a two-sided mask in the top right of the flyer.

Building the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School

1965–1966

View early documents from a center for the Black Arts movement in Harlem, founded by the poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka).

Primary Source

Black women wearing white shirts (with a blue ridged neckline) and blue skirts, and Black men in white shirts, white pants, and brown hats, cutting sugar cane.

Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

with Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris

Learn how sexuality was a point of both exploitation and resistance for enslaved people.

Video

A Black woman with reddish-brown hair and hands together at the front of her body, wearing a white shirt, black-and-white striped blazer, and earrings.

Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence

with Kellie Carter Jackson

Explore the history of Black abolitionism in the antebellum period.

Video

Marcus Nevius wearing a checked-stripe sport coat with a lapel pin over a gray turtleneck.

City of Refuge

with Marcus P. Nevius

Explore the history of freed peoples in the Great Dismal Swamp and their relationship to maroon communities.

Video

A bald white man wearing rectangular glasses and a suit smiles at the camera. He is standing in front of a bust of Lincoln and a bookshelf.

Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

with James Oakes

Understand the evolution of the antislavery interpretation of the Constitution.

Video

AP African American Studies Resource Library

African American Scientists

with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Preamble and Articles of Association of Free African Society”

1787

Benjamin Banneker’s Study of the Cicada

1800

Diasporic Solidarity and the Cuban Revolution

with Danielle Pilar Clealand

Black and Latino Solidarity Movements

with Danielle Pilar Clealand

Josiah Thomas Walls

ca. 1870

Radical Members of the South Carolina Legislature

1872

Building the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School

1965–1966

Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

with Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris

Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence

with Kellie Carter Jackson

City of Refuge

with Marcus P. Nevius

Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

with James Oakes

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