Glossary of Black History — Black-History.com

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Black Arts Movement: The politically engaged movement of Black poets, playwrights, and artists, launched in 1965, that its theorists called the artistic sister of Black Power.
Black Codes: Laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 to restrict the freedom of formerly enslaved people and force them back into plantation labor.
Black Power: The slogan and movement, popularized in 1966, calling for Black political and economic self-determination, racial pride, and independent institutions.
Brown v. Board of Education: The unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision holding that racially segregated public schools are “inherently unequal” and unconstitutional.

Civil Rights Act of 1964: The federal law, signed 2 July 1964, that outlawed segregation in public accommodations and banned employment discrimination.
Convict Leasing: A system, used across the South from the end of the Civil War until 1928, in which states and counties rented prisoners, mostly Black, to private employers.

Dred Scott v. Sandford: The 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black Americans could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories.

Emancipation: The process by which enslaved Americans won freedom during the Civil War, from wartime escapes and the Emancipation Proclamation to the Thirteenth Amendment.

Forty Acres and a Mule: The broken promise of land for freed families, rooted in General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 of January 1865 and reversed within the year.
Freedmen’s Bureau: The federal agency created in March 1865 to aid freedpeople and white refugees in the postwar South with relief, labor contracts, schools, and land.
Freedom Rides: The 1961 interracial bus journeys through the South that tested federal rulings against segregation in interstate travel and met mob violence.
Freedom Summer: The 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, which brought about 1,000 volunteers to register Black voters, teach Freedom Schools, and build the MFDP.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: A federal law in the Compromise of 1850 that compelled free states to aid in capturing freedom seekers and denied the accused a jury or a voice in court.

Great Migration: The movement of roughly six million Black Southerners to cities of the North, Midwest, and West between about 1910 and 1970.

Harlem Renaissance: The flowering of Black literature, music, theater, and visual art centered in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.
HBCU (Historically Black College or University): A college or university founded before 1964 whose principal mission was, and is, the education of Black Americans, as defined in federal law.

Jim Crow: The system of laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and Black disfranchisement, chiefly in the South, from the late 1800s to the 1960s.
Juneteenth: The 19 June commemoration of General Order No. 3, which announced the end of slavery in Texas in 1865; a federal holiday since 2021.

Literacy Test: A reading or “understanding” exam required to register to vote, used by Southern registrars to disfranchise Black citizens until Congress banned it.
Lynching: Killing by a mob without legal process, used after Reconstruction as a weapon of racial terror against Black Americans; not a federal crime until 2022.

Middle Passage: The forced Atlantic crossing of captive Africans to the Americas, the deadliest leg of the transatlantic slave trade.

Negro Leagues: The professional baseball leagues, founded in 1920, that Black players built and ran while the major leagues kept them out.
New Negro Movement: The early twentieth-century assertion of Black self-definition, pride, and political militancy that Alain Locke named and anthologized in 1925.

Plessy v. Ferguson: The 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld a Louisiana railroad segregation law and established the “separate but equal” doctrine.
Poll Tax: A per-person tax that Southern states required for voting to disfranchise Black and poor citizens; outlawed in federal elections in 1964, all in 1966.

Reconstruction: The era from 1865 to 1877 when the nation rebuilt the Union after the Civil War and, for a time, secured citizenship and voting rights for freedpeople.
Redlining: The federal and private practice, codified in the 1930s, of rating Black neighborhoods as “hazardous” and denying them mortgage credit.

Sharecropping: A farm labor system that spread across the South after emancipation, in which landless families worked another’s land for a share of the crop.
Sit-In: A nonviolent protest in which demonstrators occupy seats at a segregated counter or facility and refuse to leave until served.

Talented Tenth: W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 argument that a college-educated Black leadership class would guide the advancement of the race.

Underground Railroad: The network of freedom seekers, routes, safe houses, and allies through which enslaved African Americans escaped bondage before and during the Civil War.

Voting Rights Act of 1965: The federal law, signed 6 August 1965, that suspended literacy tests and put discriminatory jurisdictions under federal oversight of their elections.