Unit 3 · The Practice of Freedom

Reconstruction ● (core concept) — The period from 1865 to 1877 when the federal government attempted to rebuild the South and secure rights for formerly enslaved people.

Thirteenth Amendment ● (core concept) — The 1865 amendment that abolished slavery in the United States.

Fourteenth Amendment ● (core concept) — The 1868 amendment establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law, overturning the Dred Scott decision.

Fifteenth Amendment ● (core concept) — The 1870 amendment prohibiting the denial of voting rights on the basis of race.

Hiram R. Revels ● (core concept) — The first African American member of Congress, seated in the Senate in 1870.

Blanche Bruce ● (core concept) — The first African American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate.

Joseph Rainey ● (core concept) — The first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the longest-serving Black officeholder of Reconstruction.

John Lynch ● (core concept) — The first African American speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

James Rapier ● (core concept) — A Reconstruction-era congressman who founded the first Black-owned newspaper in Alabama.

Freedmen's Bureau ● (core concept) — The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, operating from 1865 to 1872 to provide food, clothing, legalized marriages, and schools for formerly enslaved people.

Reuniting Black families ● (core concept) — After emancipation, formerly enslaved people placed newspaper advertisements and traveled to find family members sold away under slavery.

Jumping the broom ● (core concept) — A marriage ritual performed by enslaved and newly freed African Americans to formalize their unions.

The Christian Recorder ● (core concept) — Founded in 1852, the oldest continuously published African American newspaper.

Black Codes ● (core concept) — Laws passed in 1865 and 1866 to restrict Black labor and movement through vagrancy statutes, labor contracts, and child apprenticeships.

Special Field Orders No. 15 ● (core concept) — General Sherman's 1865 order setting aside 400,000 acres of land in forty-acre segments for formerly enslaved people; it was later revoked by President Andrew Johnson.

Sharecropping ● (core concept) — The agricultural labor system that replaced slavery in the South, in which Black farmers rented land and paid with a share of their crops.

Crop liens ● (core concept) — Legal claims on a farmer's future crops used by merchants to trap Black farmers in debt.

Convict leasing ● (core concept) — The practice of leasing imprisoned Black people to private employers, exploiting the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause.

Compromise of 1877 ● (core concept) — The political settlement that ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the South.

Poll taxes ● (core concept) — Fees required to vote, used to disenfranchise Black voters after Reconstruction.

Literacy tests ● (core concept) — Tests required for voter registration, administered to exclude Black voters.

Grandfather clauses ● (core concept) — Provisions exempting men from voting restrictions if their grandfathers could vote, shielding white voters while excluding Black ones.

Ku Klux Klan ● (core concept) — The white supremacist organization that used terror to suppress Black political power after the Civil War.

Plessy v. Ferguson ● (core concept) — The 1896 Supreme Court decision establishing the separate but equal doctrine.

Jim Crow ● (core concept) — The system of racial segregation laws in the South, named for T.D. Rice's 1830s minstrel character Jump, Jim Crow.

Nadir ● (core concept) — The term coined by historian Rayford W. Logan for the low point of Black life from Reconstruction to World War II.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett ● (core concept) — The journalist and anti-lynching activist whose 1895 pamphlet A Red Record documented lynching in the United States.

Trolley boycotts ● (core concept) — Early twentieth-century boycotts of segregated streetcars by Black communities.

Red Summer of 1919 ● (core concept) — The wave of more than thirty urban race riots in 1919, a term coined by James Weldon Johnson, driven by job competition, the flu pandemic, and attacks on Black World War I veterans.

Tulsa Race Massacre ● (core concept) — The 1921 destruction of the Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, in which more than 1,250 homes and businesses were burned, blocking the inheritance of Black wealth.

Claude McKay ● (core concept) — The poet whose 1919 poem If We Must Die responded to the Red Summer's racial violence.

Double consciousness ● (core concept) — W.E.B. Du Bois's concept from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) describing the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a racist society.

The Veil ● (core concept) — Du Bois's metaphor for the barrier of racism separating Black Americans from full participation in American life.

The color line ● (core concept) — Du Bois's phrase, from his claim that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, describing racial division in America.

We Wear the Mask ● (core concept) — Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1895 poem about the mask Black people wore to conceal pain behind a cheerful public face.

Sorrow Songs ● (core concept) — Du Bois's name for the spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk, which he treated as profound expressions of Black experience.

Lifting as We Climb ● (core concept) — The motto of Black women's uplift organizing, holding that individual advancement should raise the whole community.

Booker T. Washington ● (core concept) — The educator who advocated industrial education for Black people and delivered the Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895.

W.E.B. Du Bois ● (core concept) — The scholar and activist who opposed Washington's approach, demanding liberal arts education and full civil rights.

Anna Julia Cooper ● (core concept) — The author of A Voice from the South (1892), arguing for Black women's education and leadership.

Nannie Helen Burroughs ● (core concept) — The educator who helped found the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and opened her own school in 1909.

Lift Every Voice and Sing ● (core concept) — The 1900 song that became known as the Black National Anthem.

Freedom's Journal ● (core concept) — The first African American newspaper, founded in 1827.

Chicago Defender ● (core concept) — The Black newspaper founded in 1905 that reached national influence, especially during the Great Migration.

AME Church ● (core concept) — The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816 as the first Black Christian denomination.

Madam C.J. Walker ● (core concept) — The entrepreneur who became the first woman millionaire in the United States.

Citizens Savings Bank and Trust Company ● (core concept) — Founded in 1904, the oldest continuously operating Black-owned bank in the United States.

HBCUs ● (core concept) — Historically Black Colleges and Universities; though only about 3 percent of colleges, they have educated about 40 percent of Black members of Congress and 80 percent of Black judges.

Wilberforce University ● (core concept) — Founded in 1856, the first college owned and operated by Black people.

Cheyney University ● (core concept) — Founded in 1837, the first HBCU established in the United States.

Howard University ● (core concept) — The HBCU named for General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau.

Second Morrill Act of 1890 ● (core concept) — The federal law that funded land-grant colleges for Black students, creating eighteen HBCUs.

Fisk versus Tuskegee educational models ● (core concept) — Fisk represented the liberal-arts model of Black education while Tuskegee represented the vocational-industrial model.

Fisk Jubilee Singers ● (core concept) — The choral group that brought spirituals to a global stage.

Black Greek-letter organizations ○ — Fraternities and sororities founded by Black students, such as those that grew on HBCU campuses.

New Negro movement ● (core concept) — The 1920s movement, articulated in Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro, asserting a new, self-confident Black cultural identity.

Alain Locke ● (core concept) — The philosopher who edited The New Negro (1925) and was the first African American Rhodes Scholar, in 1907.

Harlem Renaissance ● (core concept) — The 1920s and 1930s flourishing of Black literature, art, and intellectual life, with blues and jazz as counternarratives to racist images.

James Van Der Zee ● (core concept) — The photographer whose portraits documented Harlem life from 1905 to 1938.

1900 Paris Exposition ● (core concept) — The world's fair where W.E.B. Du Bois's Exhibit of American Negroes, seen by 45 million visitors, presented Black life through photographs and data.

Heritage poems ● (core concept) — Poems titled Heritage by Gwendolyn Bennett (1922) and Countee Cullen (1925) in which Harlem Renaissance poets reflected on Africa, countering racist stereotypes.

Blues ● (core concept) — The musical genre rooted in slavery-era expression, moving from the acoustic South to the electric North with the Great Migration, built on repetition, call and response, and vernacular language.

Jazz ● (core concept) — The genre born in New Orleans that the course calls the most distinctive American contribution to the arts.

Duke Ellington ● (core concept) — The jazz composer of It Don't Mean a Thing (1943) and Symphony in Black (1934).

Cabin in the Sky ● (core concept) — The 1943 all-Black musical film.

Ethel Waters ● (core concept) — The performer who in 1939 became the first African American to star in her own television show.

Katherine Dunham ● (core concept) — The dancer and choreographer who drew on African diasporic movement traditions.

Carter G. Woodson ● (core concept) — The historian who founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and created Negro History Week, the forerunner of Black History Month.

The Mis-Education of the Negro ● (core concept) — Woodson's 1933 book critiquing how American education miseducated Black students.

Zora Neale Hurston ● (core concept) — The writer and anthropologist who documented Black culture and linguistic expression.

Arturo Schomburg ● (core concept) — The collector whose library became the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

African Free School ● (core concept) — The late eighteenth-century New York school that educated free Black children, part of a two-century tradition of Black intellectual life before the formal field.

The Negro Digs Up His Past ● (core concept) — Schomburg's 1925 essay asserting the value of recovering Black history.

Great Migration ● (core concept) — The movement of about six million African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities from the 1910s to the 1970s, driven by labor shortages, boll weevils and floods, lynching, railways, and the Black press.

National Urban League ● (core concept) — The organization founded in 1910 to assist Black migrants adjusting to urban life.

Jacob Lawrence ● (core concept) — The artist whose Migration Series (1940-41) depicted the Great Migration.

Afro-Caribbean migration ● (core concept) — The migration of more than 140,000 Afro-Caribbean people between 1899 and 1937, mostly to Florida and New York, adding religious and linguistic diversity and blending cultures.

Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) ● (core concept) — Marcus Garvey's organization, the largest pan-African movement, promoting the slogan Africa for the Africans.

Black Star Line ● (core concept) — Garvey's UNIA shipping company, intended to link Black people across the diaspora through trade.

Red, black, and green flag ● (core concept) — The pan-African flag popularized by Garvey's UNIA.

Negro World ● (core concept) — The UNIA newspaper that circulated in more than forty countries.