This course will examine and analyze Black American society and culture as it has developed from its roots in West Africa to the Great Migration and World War I. Primary emphasis will be on the West African cultures from which most enslaved Africans were taken; the American colonial experience and the origins of slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries; the pre-Civil War culture of free black Americans; the development of slave culture, religion, and resistance; the era of Reconstruction; the different programs proposed by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois; and the electric effects of the Great Migration and World War I on the Black American community.

Prerequisite: Open to students in fifth and sixth form with departmental approval