AFS 3000 - Black Experience: From the African Beginnings to 1865

This course will examine the myriad patterns of adaptation and adjustments made by the enslaved Africans and free people of color to the continuing oppressive character of American Society prior to 1865. Slave narratives and abolitionists tracts written by freed people reveal much about the African-Americans’ interpretation of their presence in the New World. The Black presence created a commonality of experience, the characteristics of which became and remain a distinctive American co-culture. It aims to examine how the Black presence altered the idea of race and how this alteration became a function of the institutional forms that Black Americans have shaped to survive in a hostile environment.

Credits: 3 hours