Introduction to African American Studies: Who Tells Your Story?
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Introduction to African American Studies: Who Tells Your Story?

A rigorous, university-level course exploring the history, culture, politics, and intellectual traditions of African Americans — examining who controls narratives, whose voices are centered, and why it matters.

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Introduction to African American Studies: Who Tells Your Story?

What you'll learn

What you'll be able to do

  • Trace the historical arc of African American life from pre-colonial West Africa through the 21st century, identifying key turning points and their lasting effects.
  • Apply core concepts from African American Studies — including double consciousness, intersectionality, systemic racism, and cultural resistance — to historical and contemporary events.
  • Critically analyze primary and secondary sources, identifying whose perspectives are centered and whose are marginalized.
  • Examine the relationship between political power, narrative control, and the construction of Black identity in American society.
  • Engage with landmark works of Black literature, philosophy, art, and music as intellectual and political documents.
  • Evaluate the strategies, successes, and tensions of major civil rights and Black liberation movements from Reconstruction to Black Lives Matter.
  • Articulate the global dimensions of Black identity through the lens of Pan-Africanism, the African diaspora, and Afrofuturism.
  • Construct evidence-based arguments about race, justice, and representation using the interdisciplinary tools of African American Studies.

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The curriculum

What's inside your school

7 modules · 19 lessons

1

What Is African American Studies? — The Discipline and Its Stakes

Before diving into history, we establish the intellectual framework. This module introduces African American Studies as an academic discipline — its origins in the campus activism of the 1960s, its core methodologies, and why the question of who tells a story is itself a scholarly and political act.

  • 1.1The Birth of a Discipline: From Protest to the AcademyIncluded
  • 1.2Core Concepts: Double Consciousness, Intersectionality, and the Master NarrativeIncluded
  • 1.3Reading Sources Critically: Who Wrote This, and Why?Included
2

Roots and Rupture — Africa, the Middle Passage, and Slavery

This module grounds students in the African civilizations that preceded and survived the transatlantic slave trade, examines the mechanics and human cost of the Middle Passage, and explores how enslaved people built culture, community, and resistance under conditions designed to annihilate them.

  • 2.1Before the Chains: West African Civilizations and the Roots of Black IdentityIncluded
  • 2.2The Middle Passage: Terror, Survival, and the Architecture of DehumanizationIncluded
  • 2.3Slavery in America: Labor, Law, and the Construction of RaceIncluded
3

Freedom, Betrayal, and Resilience — From Emancipation to the Great Migration

This module covers one of the most misunderstood eras in American history: the radical promise of Reconstruction, its violent dismantling, the birth of Jim Crow, and the determined cultural and intellectual flourishing that Black Americans sustained despite systematic terror — culminating in the Great Migration north.

  • 3.1Reconstruction: The Revolution That Almost WasIncluded
  • 3.2Jim Crow, Lynching, and the Architecture of TerrorIncluded
  • 3.3The Great Migration: Moving North, Building PowerIncluded
4

Renaissance, Revolution, and Resistance — Culture as Politics

Explore how Black Americans have used art, music, literature, and performance as forms of political and intellectual resistance — from the Harlem Renaissance to the blues, jazz, soul, hip-hop, and contemporary Black cultural production. This module argues that Black culture is inseparable from Black politics.

  • 4.1The Harlem Renaissance: Art, Identity, and the New NegroIncluded
  • 4.2The Blues, Jazz, and Soul: Sorrow, Subversion, and SurvivalIncluded
  • 4.3Hip-Hop as History: From the South Bronx to Global PhenomenonIncluded
5

The Long Freedom Struggle — Civil Rights, Black Power, and Beyond

Move beyond the 'Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King marched, we all won' narrative to examine the full complexity of the Black freedom struggle — its many organizations, philosophies, internal debates, and the coordinated government efforts to destroy it.

  • 5.1The Civil Rights Movement: Strategy, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Legislative VictoryIncluded
  • 5.2Black Power: Self-Determination, Community Control, and the State's ResponseIncluded
  • 5.3From Mass Incarceration to Black Lives Matter: The Unfinished StruggleIncluded
6

Global Blackness — Pan-Africanism, the Diaspora, and Afrofuturism

Expand the frame beyond the United States to examine Black identity and struggle as a global phenomenon — exploring Pan-Africanism, the intellectual and political connections of the African diaspora, and the Afrofuturist tradition that imagines liberated Black futures.

  • 6.1Pan-Africanism: The Global Vision of Black LiberationIncluded
  • 6.2The African Diaspora: Blackness Beyond BordersIncluded
  • 6.3Afrofuturism: Imagining Black FuturesIncluded
7

The Black Church as New Village

This module translates the structure of African village life snd sees it reiterated an reinterpretated through the Black Church

  • 7.1New lessonIncluded

Questions

Frequently asked

Your teacher

A note from your teacher

KS

Kirby Spivey

I've spent years sitting at the intersection of history, literature, and lived experience — asking the same question this course is named after: Who tells your story? African American Studies gave me a framework not just for understanding the past, but for interrogating the present. It taught me that history is never neutral, that culture is always political, and that the act of naming, writing, and teaching a story is itself an act of power.

In this course, I want to give you what I wish I had been given earlier: a structured, honest, intellectually serious introduction to one of the most important fields of study in the academy. We will read W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. We will listen to the blues and study its politics. We will sit with the terror of the Middle Passage and the brilliance of the Harlem Renaissance. We will trace the long road from Reconstruction's betrayal to the courtrooms of the Civil Rights Movement to the streets of today.

I don't expect you to agree with everything you encounter here. I expect you to engage — carefully, honestly, and with the full weight of your critical mind. That's what this discipline demands, and it's what the story deserves.

— Kirby Spivey

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  • 7 modules, 19 lessons
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