Unit 4 · Movements and Debates

Négritude ● (core concept) — The 1930s to 1950s movement of French-speaking Caribbean and African writers, French for Blackness, that rejected colonial assimilation and asserted African cultural identity; it was influenced by the New Negro movement.

Negrismo ● (core concept) — The movement of Black and mixed-race writers in Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean that celebrated African contributions in music, folklore, literature, and art.

Aimé Césaire ● (core concept) — The Martinican poet and politician of the Négritude movement, author of Discourse on Colonialism (1955).

Léopold Senghor ● (core concept) — The Senegalese poet and statesman who was a founder of the Négritude movement.

Jessie Redmon Fauset ● (core concept) — The writer and editor who connected the Harlem Renaissance to Négritude writers.

Langston Hughes as translator ● (core concept) — Hughes translated French-language Black writers, serving as a bridge between the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement.

Loïs Mailou Jones ● (core concept) — The artist whose 1938 painting Les Fétiches reflected the diasporic reach of Négritude ideas.

Wifredo Lam ● (core concept) — The Afro-Cuban artist whose 1943 painting The Jungle engaged African diasporic themes.

Ghana independence ● (core concept) — Ghana became independent in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah, the first sub-Saharan African nation to do so, drawing visits from figures including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Pauli Murray, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Pan-Africanism ● (core concept) — The movement for solidarity among people of African descent worldwide; W.E.B. Du Bois is called the father of modern pan-Africanism, building on earlier thinkers like Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Blyden.

Year of Africa ● (core concept) — 1960, when seventeen African nations gained independence.

Black Freedom movement ● (core concept) — The mid-1940s to 1970s struggle for Black freedom, encompassing both the Civil Rights movement and Black Power.

Double V Campaign ● (core concept) — The 1942 campaign, proposed by James G. Thompson in the Pittsburgh Courier, calling for victory against fascism abroad and against Jim Crow at home.

Tuskegee Airmen ● (core concept) — The Black fighter pilots of World War II, known as the Red Tails, who served in a segregated military.

6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion ● (core concept) — The battalion of more than 800 Black women, led by Charity Adams and Mary Kearney, that served overseas in World War II.

G.I. Bill of 1944 ● (core concept) — The veterans' benefits law that was race-neutral in design but, because it was locally administered, disproportionately disbursed benefits to white veterans rather than to the 1.2 million Black veterans.

Brown v. Board of Education ● (core concept) — The 1954 Supreme Court decision ruling state-sanctioned school segregation unconstitutional, violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and overturning separate but equal.

Separate but equal ● (core concept) — The doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized racial segregation, overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Doll test ● (core concept) — The 1940s study by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark showing the impact of segregation on children's self-esteem, which the Supreme Court cited in Brown v. Board of Education.

De facto segregation ● (core concept) — Segregation in fact rather than by law, which persisted in public schools despite the Brown decision.

Little Rock Nine ● (core concept) — The nine students who attempted to integrate Little Rock High School in Arkansas in 1957 despite violent resistance.

Ruby Bridges ● (core concept) — The student who integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

James Meredith ● (core concept) — The student who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Civil Rights Act of 1875 ● (core concept) — The law outlawing racial discrimination in public places, which the Civil Rights movement sought to see enforced through federal protection.

Gordon Parks ● (core concept) — The photographer whose 1947 images documented the Clark doll test in Harlem.

Redlining ● (core concept) — The practice in which mortgage lenders refused home loans to African Americans and other people of color in defined neighborhoods, on the claimed grounds that those areas were too risky to invest in; the practice peaked in the mid-1900s.

Home Owners' Loan Corporation ● (core concept) — The federal agency whose 1937 Residential Security map of Philadelphia and Camden graded neighborhoods by supposed risk, codifying housing discrimination.

FHA Underwriting Manual ● (core concept) — The Federal Housing Administration's 1938 manual whose restrictions kept African Americans out of many U.S. communities, entrenching housing segregation.

Fair Housing Act of 1968 ● (core concept) — The law for which the NAACP fought to ban housing discrimination.

A Raisin in the Sun ● (core concept) — Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play about a Black family confronting housing discrimination; its title comes from Langston Hughes's poem Harlem.

Jitneys ● (core concept) — Small buses that African Americans operated to provide taxi services where segregated public transportation was unequal.

Big Four civil rights organizations ● (core concept) — The NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

NAACP ● (core concept) — The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed in 1909 as an interracial organization fighting discrimination primarily through legal campaigns; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were among its founders.

SCLC ● (core concept) — The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, established in 1957 with Martin Luther King Jr. as its first president, which coordinated churches and local organizations in major protests such as the Selma Voting Rights March of 1965.

CORE ● (core concept) — The Congress of Racial Equality, established by Black and white students in Chicago in 1942, which organized sit-ins, voter registration drives, and the 1961 Freedom Rides.

SNCC ● (core concept) — The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded in 1960 with Ella Baker's assistance after the Greensboro sit-ins, practicing nonviolent direct action through grassroots organizing.

Birmingham Children's Crusade ● (core concept) — The 1963 campaign in which civil rights leaders strategically included children, since they could not lose homes or jobs; the televised police violence against them shocked the world.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ● (core concept) — The 1963 march organized by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and civil rights groups, drawing over 250,000 participants, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech.

Mississippi Freedom Summer ● (core concept) — The 1964 project in which the Big Four civil rights organizations set up 41 Freedom Schools combining voter registration with Black history education; the killing of three young activists that summer, one African American and two Jewish, galvanized the movement and led to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 ● (core concept) — The law ending segregation and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, and religion.

Voting Rights Act of 1965 ● (core concept) — The law outlawing discriminatory barriers to voting, which expanded Black voting power and political representation.

Montgomery Bus Boycott ● (core concept) — The 1955 boycott launched with the help of Rosa Parks, the local NAACP secretary, protesting segregated buses.

Nonviolent direct resistance ● (core concept) — The shared methods of the civil rights organizations: marches, sit-ins, litigation, economic boycotts, and use of mass media, inspired by Christian principles and Mahatma Gandhi's example.

Bayard Rustin ● (core concept) — The openly gay advisor to civil rights leaders since the Montgomery Bus Boycott who was a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

John Lewis ● (core concept) — The SNCC leader whose 1963 speech The Revolution Is at Hand called for urgency and protection from racial violence.

Ella Baker ● (core concept) — Known as the mother of the Civil Rights movement, she focused on grassroots organizing and inclusive, group-centered leadership over leader-centered groups, and encouraged young people to fight both racism and sexism.

Fannie Lou Hamer ● (core concept) — The Mississippi activist who stressed addressing both racial and gender discrimination during the Black Freedom movement.

Dorothy Height ● (core concept) — The leader of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years who routinely worked on major civil rights projects such as the March on Washington.

Gloria Richardson ● (core concept) — The first woman to lead a civil rights organization outside the South, the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in Maryland, which advocated for the Treaty of Cambridge of 1963.

Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) ● (core concept) — The mid-1960s Chicago coalition established to protest school segregation, later turning to employment and housing discrimination before disbanding in 1967.

New York City school boycott of 1964 ● (core concept) — The boycott in which 464,000 students, nearly half the city's student body, protested school segregation; it was the largest single-day civil rights protest in U.S. history.

SNCC Position Paper: Women in the Movement ● (core concept) — The 1964 document addressing gender discrimination within the civil rights movement.

Nicolás Guillén ● (core concept) — The prominent Negrismo Cuban poet of African descent whose 1958 poem Little Rock connected anti-Black racism in the United States and Latin America.

Charles Mingus ● (core concept) — The jazz bassist who composed the 1960 protest song Original Faubus Fables, using call and response to mock racial segregation and Governor Orval Faubus.

Little Rock Crisis ● (core concept) — The 1957 confrontation over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, which drew international artistic protest.

Freedom songs ● (core concept) — Songs of the Civil Rights movement created by adapting hymns, spirituals, gospel songs, and labor union songs in Black churches; they unified activists, gave direction through lyrics, and expressed hope for a just future.

We Shall Overcome ● (core concept) — The anthem of the Civil Rights movement, sung while marching, protesting, and in jail, which Martin Luther King Jr. described as its anthem.

Why We Can't Wait ● (core concept) — Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 book on the struggle for racial equality.

Josephine Baker ● (core concept) — The performer who expatriated and critiqued the double standards of an American democracy that maintained segregation while promoting ideals of equality.

Nation of Islam ● (core concept) — The religious movement begun in Detroit in 1930 that combined devotion to Allah and study of the Qur'an with its own mythology and Black nationalist ideas.

Elijah Muhammad ● (core concept) — The leader of the Nation of Islam from 1934, based in Chicago, who encouraged followers to abandon their enslavers' surnames, many adopting the letter X.

Malcolm X ● (core concept) — The Muslim minister and activist who championed Black autonomy, urged African Americans to build their own institutions, exercise the vote and the right to self-defense, and later embraced orthodox Islam as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

The Ballot or the Bullet ● (core concept) — Malcolm X's 1964 speech urging African Americans to use their vote and to defend themselves if the government would not defend them.

Black Power ● (core concept) — The mid-1960s movement promoting Black self-determination, defending violence as a viable strategy, and seeking to transform Black consciousness through cultural pride; it was embraced by those who felt the Civil Rights movement's focus on integration did not address their daily disempowerment.

Muhammad Speaks ● (core concept) — The Nation of Islam's newspaper, sold on street corners to spread its message.

Black Arts movement ● (core concept) — The 1965 to 1975 movement in which Black artists, writers, musicians, and dramatists treated art as a political tool for Black liberation, unified by the idea that Black art was distinct in inspiration, characteristics, and purposes.

Amiri Baraka ● (core concept) — A central writer of the Black Arts movement, author of the 1969 poem Legacy.

Elizabeth Catlett ● (core concept) — The artist whose 1969 print Negro es Bello II, featuring African mask-like faces and panthers with the phrase Black Is Beautiful, reflected the movement's transnational reach.

Black Panther Party for Self-Defense ● (core concept) — The revolutionary Black Power organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, inspired by Malcolm X, which operated into the 1980s.

Ten-Point Program ● (core concept) — The 1966 Black Panther Party platform calling for an end to oppression and imprisonment and for access to housing, healthcare, education, and employment.

Survival programs ● (core concept) — The Black Panthers' community aid services, which included free breakfast for schoolchildren, legal aid offices, and programs providing free medical care and clothing.

FBI campaign against the Black Panthers ● (core concept) — The FBI's campaign against the Black Panther Party, treated as a national security threat after armed clashes between the party and authorities.

Black is Beautiful movement ● (core concept) — The 1960s movement that celebrated Afrocentric aesthetics in natural hairstyles, fashion, naming practices, and celebrations like Kwanzaa, rejecting notions of inferiority and conformity to mainstream beauty standards.

Afrocentricity ● (core concept) — The approach, coined by scholar Molefi Asante in the 1970s, that places Africa and the achievements of people of African descent at the center of history.

Kwanzaa ● (core concept) — The African-centered celebration established in 1966.

Sankofa bird ● (core concept) — An Akan adinkra symbol embraced during the Black is Beautiful movement.

Kathleen Cleaver ● (core concept) — The Black Panther Party activist who in 1968 encouraged Black people to embrace natural hair and beauty.

African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS) ● (core concept) — The artist and jazz musician collective that produced the annual Naturally fashion shows celebrating Black beauty with the Grandassa models.

Still I Rise ● (core concept) — Maya Angelou's 1978 poem of Black resilience.

CROWN Act ● (core concept) — The 2019 California law prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle and hair texture.

Combahee River Collective ● (core concept) — The Boston-based Black feminist and lesbian organization whose 1977 Collective Statement argued that Black women's liberation would require destroying all systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.

Womanist ● (core concept) — The term coined by writer Alice Walker in the 1980s for Black women's activism, opposing racism in the feminist community and sexism in Black communities.

Intersectionality ● (core concept) — The term introduced by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1990s as a framework for understanding Black women's distinct experiences through the interactions of their social, economic, and political identities with systems of inequality and privilege.

Jarena Lee ○ — An eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black woman activist who resisted injustice as both enslaved and free, inspiring later Black feminists.

Interlocking systems of oppression ● (core concept) — The concept, first articulated by Patricia Hill Collins and widely used in sociology, describing how social categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability interact with social systems to produce unequal outcomes.

Gwendolyn Brooks ● (core concept) — The Chicago poet who in 1950 became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize; her 1953 novel Maud Martha traces a Black girl's life on Chicago's South Side.

Audre Lorde ● (core concept) — The writer who addressed identity, representation, and womanhood from the distinctive perspective of being a Black woman.

2016 racial wealth gap ● (core concept) — In 2016, median wealth was $17,150 for Black families compared with $171,000 for white families, reflecting limits on generational wealth from early twentieth-century discrimination in housing and employment.

Shirley Chisholm ● (core concept) — The advocate for women's rights who in 1968 became the first Black woman elected to Congress and in 1971 helped found the Congressional Black Caucus.

Congressional Black Caucus ● (core concept) — The group of Black members of Congress, founded in 1971, that promotes Black political power by supporting Black candidates and lobbying for reforms in healthcare, employment, and social services.

Colin Powell ● (core concept) — In 2001 the first Black secretary of state, serving under President George W. Bush; his 1994 Howard University commencement address is a course source.

Condoleezza Rice ● (core concept) — The successor to Colin Powell and the first Black woman to serve as secretary of state.

Barack Obama ● (core concept) — Elected in 2008 as the first Black president of the United States.

Kamala Harris ● (core concept) — Elected in 2020 as the first Black vice president of the United States.

Obama portraits of 2018 ● (core concept) — The official portraits of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley and Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald, course sources on Black representation.

Growth of Black elected officials ● (core concept) — Between 1970 and 2006, the number of Black elected officials in the United States grew from about 1,500 to 9,000, a sixfold increase, with the largest annual increase in 1971.

Growth of Black immigrants ● (core concept) — The number of Black immigrants in the United States has nearly doubled since 2000, driven primarily by immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

Black-identifying population in 2019 ● (core concept) — Between 2000 and 2019, the Black-identifying U.S. population grew 30 percent to about 47 million people, nearly 14 percent of the country's population.

Black religious affiliation in the twenty-first century ● (core concept) — About two-thirds of African American adults identify as Protestant, while about 20 percent do not affiliate with any religion.

Black versus African American as ethnonyms ● (core concept) — The unifying term Black signals shared African heritage and experience, while African American is the ethnonym often used by descendants of those enslaved in the United States.

Pew Research Center reports of 2021 ○ — Course sources documenting the growing diversity of Black America and the religious shifts among young Black adults.

African-based musical elements ● (core concept) — The foundation of African American music: improvisation, call and response, syncopation, storytelling, and the fusion of music with dance.

Ruth Brown ● (core concept) — The early R&B singer featured as a course source on the evolution of African American music.

Founders of rock and roll ● (core concept) — African American performers such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard laid the foundation for rock and roll by modifying gospel and blues with new rhythms and electric instruments.

Portia K. Maultsby ● (core concept) — The scholar whose 1980 work The Evolution of African American Music is a course source.

Hip-hop ● (core concept) — The culture born in the 1970s among young Black and Latino community members in New York City's Bronx borough, which developed into a global phenomenon.

Grandmaster Flash ● (core concept) — The DJ who added improvised vocal rhymes and experimented with turntable techniques such as mixing and scratching, which became the origins of modern rap music.

Breakdancing ● (core concept) — The dance that emerged when DJs extended the break in a song; it was performed independently by b-boys and b-girls and in crews.

Graffiti art in hip-hop ● (core concept) — The writers who emblazoned walls, bridges, and subway cars with art became a vital form of expression in hip-hop culture, bringing acclaim to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat.

James Brown ● (core concept) — The artist whose music influenced the DJs who shared music at community events in the 1970s.

Queen Latifah and Kendrick Lamar ● (core concept) — Hip-hop artists, from Queen Latifah to Kendrick Lamar, who have increased awareness of African Americans' political issues in music reaching global audiences.

Oscar Micheaux ● (core concept) — The filmmaker who produced nearly fifty films between the 1920s and 1940s, creating opportunities for all-Black casts in realistic, complex roles that challenged negative stereotypes.

Soul Train ● (core concept) — The African American dance program created by Don Cornelius in 1971, modeled on American Bandstand.

August Wilson ● (core concept) — The playwright whose play Fences (1987) is a course source on Black life in theater.

The Jeffersons ● (core concept) — The 1975 to 1985 television show that portrayed Black upward mobility.

Good Times ○ — The 1974 to 1979 television show depicting a strong Black family unit.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ○ — The 1990 to 1996 television show portraying Black upward mobility.

Oliver Lewis ● (core concept) — The jockey who won the inaugural Kentucky Derby in 1875.

William Billy Walker ● (core concept) — The jockey who won the Kentucky Derby in 1877, continuing a precedent in which most early Derby winners were African American.

Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes ● (core concept) — The league founded by Black athletes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1895, which predated the National Hockey League.

Negro leagues ● (core concept) — The baseball associations African Americans founded after the Civil War because of segregation; they persisted until the 1960s.

Jackie Robinson ● (core concept) — In 1947 the first Black player in Major League Baseball.

Jesse Owens ● (core concept) — The Olympian who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics and returned home to racial discrimination.

Muhammad Ali ● (core concept) — The boxer who in 1967 refused to enlist for the Vietnam War, citing religious reasons and continued racism at home, saying the real enemy of his people was right here.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos ● (core concept) — The Olympians who in 1968 raised the Black power fist in nonviolent protest against racial discrimination.

Colin Kaepernick ● (core concept) — The NFL player who in 2016 began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, inspiring athletes in other sports.

George Washington Carver ● (core concept) — The botanist, born enslaved, who developed methods for preventing soil depletion and served as an agriculture counselor to President Theodore Roosevelt.

Katherine Johnson ● (core concept) — The NASA mathematician whose successful calculations for space travel helped launch astronauts to the moon and back.

Mae Jemison ● (core concept) — The physician, engineer, and NASA astronaut who in 1992 became the first African American woman to travel in space.

Mary Jackson ● (core concept) — The NASA engineer featured in a 1977 course source on Black women in science and technology.

National Medical Association ● (core concept) — The organization African American physicians established to support training for Black medical professionals, since they were initially barred from the American Medical Association.

Daniel Hale Williams ● (core concept) — The physician who founded Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1891, the first Black-owned hospital in the United States, and performed the world's first successful heart surgery in 1893.

Onesimus ● (core concept) — The enslaved man who brought awareness of variolation to the British American colonies, which helped curtail smallpox.

Kizzmekia Corbett ● (core concept) — The scientist central to the development of the Moderna Covid-19 mRNA vaccine.

Henrietta Lacks (HeLa cells) ● (core concept) — In 1951, physicians at Johns Hopkins performed unsanctioned research on the poached cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks; her immortalized cells were used in developing the polio vaccine, coronavirus vaccines, and treatments for AIDS and Parkinson's disease.

J. Marion Sims ● (core concept) — The doctor who in the 1840s performed violent experiments without anesthesia on enslaved women including Anarcha Westcott, Lucy, and Betsey, now honored as the foremothers of modern gynecology.

Tuskegee syphilis study ● (core concept) — The study, sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Health, of syphilis in untreated African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1942 to 1972.

Eugenics ● (core concept) — The early twentieth-century movement whose stigmatization of persons considered inferior by race and ability led to forced sterilization and other violations of Black people's rights.

Americans with Disabilities Act ● (core concept) — The 1990 law prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in housing, employment, and government programs, building on the civil rights legislative achievements.

Afrofuturism ● (core concept) — The movement that reimagines Black pasts, such as a past without oppression, and envisions Afrocentric futures using technology and science, expressed through art, music, film, fashion, literature, and architecture.

Sun Ra ● (core concept) — The musician whose work is among Afrofuturism's characteristic examples from the 1970s onward.

Benjamin Banneker ● (core concept) — The mathematician and astronomer whose study of the stars in his Almanac and Ephemeris is an early example of Afrofuturism.

Phillis Wheatley as Afrofuturist precursor ● (core concept) — The poet's visions of future freedom and mobility after abolition are early examples of Afrofuturism.

Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) ● (core concept) — The actress whose 1968 portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek showed Black presence in the future; at Martin Luther King Jr.'s urging she stayed on the show, and her recruitment work later helped diversify the U.S. space program.

Octavia E. Butler ● (core concept) — The novelist whose work is a characteristic example of Afrofuturism.