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

A sepia photograph of a stone house with a shingled roof.

Antebellum Black Women Resisting Enslavement

by Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Explore Black women’s role in the Christiana Resistance, the abolitionist press, and other means of resisting enslavement.

Essay

Scan of a signed contract engaging a captain to oversee a set of men acting as a slave patrol, with manuscript accomplishment, signed by Obadiah Woodson and Horace L. Robards.

Slave Patrol Contract

1856

Explore an effort to enforce North Carolina’s slave codes in 1856.

Primary Source

A Black Haitian general (wearing a pointed and feathered hat, dark coat with tails and epaulets, white pants, and dark boots) holding a book next to other troops, as a priest in formal robes and holding a staff looks above toward an image of God.

Preliminary Declaration from the Constitution of Haiti

1805

Read a translation of some of Haiti’s founding principles as an independent nation.

Primary Source

A Black man smiling while wearing a black suit, light blue shirt, and patterned red tie.

A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist

with Michael Thurmond

Learn how James Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, helped to secure Ayuba bin Suleiman Diallo’s freedom.

Video

Arkansas Petition for Freedmen’s Rights

1869

Read a petition on behalf of formerly enslaved African Americans on indigenous territory requesting tribal citizenship and benefits.

Primary Source

“Walker’s Appeal”

1829

Black abolitionist David Walker wrote a powerful pamphlet on the effects of enslavement on African Americans and what enslaved people should do to escape.

Primary Source

A map of the coast of Liberia, with the Atlantic Ocean appearing diagonally in the middle of the map.

The First Age of Reform

by Ronald G. Walters

Learn more about the debates related to colonization in the context of other antebellum reform movements.

Essay

Image of man sitting and posing for a black and white photograph.

“Hidden Practices”: Frederick Douglass on Segregation and Black Achievement, 1887

by Edward L. Ayers

Analyze a letter written by Frederick Douglass describing his feelings on Black progress.

Essay

Gwendolyn Brooks, a bespectacled Black woman, wearing a brown and magenta floral shirt and a brown head cover.

“We're the Only Colored People Here”

1945

Read a short story that would grow into Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953).

Primary Source

An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law

1850

Explore a letter written by a free Black man in Boston.

Primary Source

A woodcut of a Black woman with short hair, her wrists in shackles, kneeling and looking up, with the phrase “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” arched above

“Emigration to Mexico”

1832

Explore a perspective on emigration in The Liberator.

Primary Source

A white tile mosaic mural of several Black people airborne above buildings.

“Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines”

by Faith Ringgold

View a fantastical homage to Harlem history through this work of art in the New York City subway.

Work of Art

AP African American Studies Resource Library