Roughly 60 public high schools across the country this school year are piloting a new Advanced Placement course called African American Studies, the first new College Board offering since 2014.

The pilot will expand to hundreds more schools next school year and will be available nationwide in 2024-25.

Lessons for the interdisciplinary class — which in addition to history will include literature, political science, art and other subjects — will span 400 years and include the origins of the African diaspora, the slave trade, culture and community, resistance and abolition, Reconstruction, Black freedom movements and contemporary debates.

For Black students, learning the breadth of Black history “serves the purpose of giving them a sense of pride in their history, but it also draws them in further because they’re seeing themselves in what they’re learning,” said Patrice Frasier, a teacher at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in Maryland who is piloting the new AP course in her African American Studies class.

The course, which has been in development for a decade, comes at a time of national debate about how Black history, racism and other contentious topics should be taught. At the same time, popular interest in Black history and historical racism has surged.

Educators lobbied the College Board for years to develop such a class to build self-esteem in Black students and encourage more to take AP classes.

Washington Post, Dec. 2