Jessyca Mathews stood outside her classroom door, as she usually does, greeting students as they entered a colorful room decorated with Black Lives Matter posters and encouraging words from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Maya Angelou. The lights were low as students took their seats, while the song “Golden” by Jill Scott played softly in the background. Rhythmic lyrics about freedom soon faded away, leaving only the collective sound of students typing notes—either from their desks or from a recliner against the back wall—as Mathews began teaching her Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies class.
Mathews tells The Progressive the space she has created for the course sets the tone for what she wants students to learn. “I wanted [students] to see Black faces, Black quotes, and Black literature,” she says. “I wanted [the room] to be a space where, even if you aren’t Black, [you can] feel the importance and excellence,” says Mathews, the AP African American Studies teacher at Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Michigan.
The course’s curriculum starts in Africa around 900 B.C.E., then moves into slavery, reconstruction, and contemporary issues. The class is discussion-based, culminating in a required class presentation followed by an oral dissertation.
“I took this class because I wanted to know my history,” says Amere Mason, a seventeen-year-old junior in Mathews’s class. He adds that the curriculum has helped him identify and navigate personal experiences with discrimination. He is taking the AP exam at the end of the semester, which gives him the potential to earn college credit for the course.
Randi Richardson
Amere Mason, pictured in Jessyca Mathews’s classroom at Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Michigan
Carman-Ainsworth is one of about 1,300 high schools across the country offering AP African American Studies during the 2025-2026 school year. About 160 schools that offered the class last school year decided not to bring it back again, and the course is generally less available and less recognized by colleges than other AP courses. About 700 colleges across the country offer credit for passing scores on the AP exam. By contrast, AP U.S. History is offered at 17,000 high schools this year and roughly 2,000 colleges offer credit. About 7,000 high schools offer A.P. World History and 1,900 colleges extend credit. Experts in education and antiracism work attribute the difference in availability for AP African American Studies to a lack of recognition from colleges, shortages in instructors available to teach the course, waning student interest in some states and the current sociopolitical climate that largely undercuts the majority of course teachings.
“A huge part of it is the fear,” Mathews says. “There is a very live campaign of shutting down marginalized people’s voices right now. And I cannot filter into it.” Her all-Black class has twenty-six students now, up from eleven last school year. The school’s AP World History class has less than ten students this year.
The current federal government and conservatives across the country have denied or pushed alternative histories about many of the course’s topics, such as slavery, intersectionality, equitable inclusion, and systemic oppression. They also continue to target people and places that accurately teach the Black history they deny. A teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, filed a lawsuit against his former employer, Charlotte Secondary School, alleging that he was fired for teaching a lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his middle school students. In 2024, conservatives moved to ban more than 4,000 book titles; the books were primarily about the lives of non-white people, according to a report issued by the American Library Association.
Decisions like these and current events more broadly often drive classroom conversation. Gabrielle Ford, who teaches at Bellaire High School, the largest high school in the Houston Independent School District, says her twenty or so students arrive to class quite critical of the government’s policies restricting history, education, and expression.
“They just feel empowered—very opinionated—so they have a lot to say,” Ford said, adding that the course is so popular in her building that they may offer two sections of it next school year. “I think that the thing they enjoy is that they are not being censored.” Her entire class of mostly Black and Latine students is taking the AP exam.
Federal rollbacks of race-related initiatives also include the White House ordering the Smithsonian Institute to remove some exhibits that discussed racial inequalities. The Trump Administration recently removed an educational installation about slavery from a park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but a federal judge ruled on February 16 that the removed panels must be put back by the end of the week pending further litigation; they were returned three days later. The Trump Administration also ordered federal agencies to discontinue any diversity, equity, and inclusion practices they had. The move prompted companies such as UnitedHealth Group, Victoria’s Secret, Warner Bros. Discovery, Bank of America, Pepsi, and Target to follow suit. Conservatives often justify these moves by claiming that affirmative action, reparations, or other forms of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unfair to white people.
Lauren Hall, a white teacher at Cambridge High School in a Republican district just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, says most of her 30 students are seniors who do not need the course to graduate. But they took it anyway to learn information that has been restricted in other places. Cambridge High and Hall’s AP African American Studies course are each two-thirds white.
“The most common response I get after teaching a lesson that is particularly intense or something that is not often discussed is that everybody should be taking this class,” Hall says. “They also say, ‘Why didn't I know about this before?’ I love those responses because it shows that the course is doing what it needs to do, and it shows the necessity of the class.” Her entire class plans to take the AP exam at the end of the school year.
Randi Richardson
Jessyca Mathews in her classroom at Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Michigan.
Even at schools where the course is offered, students who want to take it sometimes are not able to for more mundane reasons. Mathews says one of her students had to drop the class because she intended to take it as an elective, but it conflicted with her required course schedule. At Constitution High School in Philadelphia, the course was not offered this year. Jenn Hare, who taught it last year, declined to teach it again to free up her elective period to teach a theater course she’s always wanted, she said in a statement to The Progressive. She added that she is currently teaching four periods of African American History, which is a graduation requirement in Philadelphia. Just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, Liberty High School canceled its initial plans to offer the course again this year because too few students signed up, according to one of the school’s assistant principals, Tarsha Hillmon, who also said in her email to The Progressive that the teacher who taught the course last school year is no longer employed there.
Interest in AP courses is often tied to the possibility of receiving college credit without paying college tuition. More than 21,000 students took the official AP African American Studies exam last year. Scores of three, four, or five (five being the highest) typically earn some form of college credit depending on the institution. College Board, the organization that develops and administers AP exams, piloted AP African American Studies during the 2022-24 school years. It infamously revised the course after Florida objected to the original version. The fully operational, revised version was offered for the first time last school year. A total of about 1,900 schools have offered it at least once.
The curriculum is devalued, however, when most colleges in the country do not award passing scores on the AP exam with academic credit, says Fabienne Doucet, executive director of New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
“If I take AP African American Studies, who actually cares? Ultimately, that is what a lot of folks are looking for,” Doucet says.
Powerhouse universities like Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Morgan State, and Georgetown award credit for the course. But notable institutions like Howard University and Spelman College—both historically Black colleges—along with the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the Ivy League schools do not. Doucet adds that “African American history is American history,” encouraging more high schools to offer the AP course and more colleges to recognize it.
“At this time, no Brown [University] department has identified the AP African American Studies curriculum to be equivalent to a specific Brown course,” said Mauricio Cobian, an associate dean of curricular integration at Brown University, in an email statement to The Progressive. Cobian said this would be the first step in the university awarding students credit for the course. The department of Africana Studies at Brown University did not respond to requests for comment.
At the University of Michigan, director of public affairs Kay Jarvis says that at least one student must request that the university review the AP African American Studies exam for credit consideration, adding that no student has made that request yet. It is unclear, however, how the university informs students of this responsibility. “Once/if that request is made,” Jarvis wrote in an email to The Progressive, “staff would work with the relevant school or college to evaluate the exam for applicable course credit.”
African American history is not thoroughly covered in most general history courses, Mathews says. But her colleague, Mike Stewart, who teaches AP World History and AP U.S. History at Carman-Ainsworth, says he purposely introduces entire units on Black history, even though it is not specifically required to that degree. For his “Origins of Africa” unit in world history, he uses the same textbook that Mathews uses. Hall teaches similar material in her AP U.S. History class.
“We need to get these narratives to be a part of the mainstream narrative,” Hall says.
The crossover between the curriculum is particularly relevant as Black History Month (which began as Negro History Week in 1926) marks its centennial anniversary this February. The 250th anniversary of U.S. independence is this July. Hall says the country should let that be a catalyst to “dive into the seriousness and legitimacy of Black history” like she and her students do everyday.
The bell dismissing Mathews’ students from her class rings. The majority of students linger, with a half dozen or so immediately huddling around Mathews to ask additional questions and express their surprises and frustrations at the content of the lesson. They eventually walk out with their heads held high.
“Having this class is a celebration,” Mathews says. “This is something that people have always wanted. We’re doing it well. Kids are loving it. That’s what matters to me.”