College Board has introduced a pilot program that’s bringing African American Studies Advanced Placement (AP) courses to high schools across the country for the first time ever.
According to Education Week, College Board collaborated with academic and cultural institutions along with Black communities on the local and national levels to launch the first-ever AP Program in African American Studies.
The historic program has been started in 60 high schools and is expected to add more institutions to its roster in the coming year.
Students taking the AP African American Studies will make “key connections to the African diaspora” and have access to the benefits of college-level coursework, per Education Week.
The course will cover the Reconstruction Era, Malcolm X, and other aspects of Black American history as well as modern-day cultural contributions, including Marvel’s Black Panther film, per Time Magazine.
Renowned African American history scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. lent his expertise to the creation of the curriculum for the AP course.
“Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field—that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy,” Gates Jr. said in a statement. “AP African American Studies is not CRT. It’s not the 1619 Project. It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities.”
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