Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by Heather Andrea Williams begins with the story of education stolen by slaves in the South. Often barred by law from learning to read, slaves risked beatings to study reading and writing and to teach other enslaved people what they learned. This book places black education during slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction within the context of African American agency and self-determination.
Williams writes that in early historical writing on African American education focused on white teachers who went South to teach. Williams writes:
Several historians have written about the missionary teachers who went to southern states to teach former slaves. Historian Henry Lee Swint of Vanderbilt University was perhaps the first to devote a monograph to the northern teacher in the South. Writing in 1941 within a tradition that celebrated the white antebellum South and was contemptuous of African Americans, Swint mostly concerned himself with explaining and justifying white southern hostility toward black education. White southerners did not so much oppose the education of former slaves, he argued, as they resented the intrusion of white northern schoolteachers who carried abolitionist beliefs and a complete disregard for southern strictures into southern communities. Black people appear in Swint’s narrative almost incidentally. To his way of thinking, they exhibited little if any agency. (p. 3)
Williams says that even more modern writers on the subject of education place the African American community in the background. For instance, in Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction by Robert Morris, a book Williams found “invaluable” for her research, Morris describes the foregrounding of white participation:
In Morris’s view, “Black education was a cooperative venture involving the Freedmen’s Bureau, benevolent societies, and a corps of teachers that by July 1870 numbered 3,500.” …it seems that by not explicitly including freedpeople as participants in the “cooperative venture,” [Morris] continued to treat them as subjects who were acted upon, rather than as actors themselves. (p. 3)
In order to place African Americans at the center of the education narrative, Williams begins her story deep in the slave era. Blacks learned and taught long before white missionaries headed South. And this learning was a threat to white dominance before the first Union soldier put on his uniform. White leaders understood the threat of Black literacy and tried to stamp it out. In 1830, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill which said; “Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to the manifest injury of the citizens of the State, any free person, who shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within this State to read or write, the use of figures excepted, or shall give or sell to such slave or slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment in any court of record in this State.” (p. 15) Slaves learning to read were to be tortured with 39 lashes of the whip.
Whites who taught blacks were not typically whipped , but they did face punishment. Margaret Douglass, a white woman living in Norfolk, Va., set up a small home school for twenty free black children. When one of her students passed away, she joined in the funeral for him. This alerted the authorities to her illegal activities. Although Douglass claimed she did not know of the prohibition on teaching literacy to free blacks, she and her daughter were arrested by the city’s constables. The women were charged with engaging in “unlawfully assemble with divers negroes, for the purpose of instructing them to read and write.”
Douglass said that as a former slave owner she was no abolitionist, but she argued that as a Christian it was her duty to teach free blacks to read so that they could understand the Bible. The jury was sympathetic and imposed a small fine, but the judge sentenced her to a month’s imprisonment.
When the Civil War broke out, the American Missionary Association (AMA) sent a small number of white teachers South to Union occupied areas, like the Sea Islands and northern Virginia to educate formerly enslaved people. But this not the main effort at teaching literacy to Blacks. When Black regiments began to form in 1863, Black soldiers often sent delegates to their white officers asking for classes to be started for company and regiment based education. By 1864, newly literate African American soldiers began teaching the large numbers of Black refugees who congregated around their camps to read. So, before the Freedmen’s Bureau even began it work in 1865, tens of thousands of liberated slaves were learning literacy from missionary teachers, army officers, and USCT.
The newly literate used their hard earned ability to write to correspond with Northern abolitionist societies to ask them to set up permanent schools for the freedpeople. The letters themselves were used by the societies to raise funds and recruit teachers for the schools the freedpeople hopes would be founded.
Thus, Black mass literacy was birthed before the Federal government had even identified it as a priority.
While the USCT helped set up temporary schools for freedpeople by offering informal lesson to refugees, author Heather Williams documents efforts by the Black soldiers to put education of the former slaves on a permanent footing. She provides details of several schools for Black children that were built by Black regiments and funded through their donations.
Williams also describes the impressive efforts of two USCT to create the Lincoln Institute for training Black teachers. The Institute was established in Jefferson City, Missouri through the generosity of the USCT and it exists today as Lincoln University. According to Williams, “officers and soldiers of the Sixty-second and Sixty-fifth United States Colored Infantry in Missouri contributed more than six thousand dollars to launch Lincoln Institute… Officers of the Sixty-second Regiment contributed $1023.60, soldiers gave $3,966.50, and soldiers from the Sixty-fifth Regiment added $1,379.50. Samuel Sexton, a soldier in the Sixty-fifth Regiment, made a particularly notable contribution to the nascent school. From a weekly salary of $13, he donated $100.43.” (p. 57)
Lincoln University today acknowledges its origins among the troops of the United States Colored Troops.
Not every Black schoolhouse was erected by USCT. In many cases, the missionary school set up in a local community was erected by the African Americans in that community on land donated by them. The teacher might then be sent from the North to provide instruction. While the teacher’s pay was often subsidized by the Northern abolitionists, African Americans donated substantial amounts of money to keep the school going.
As the war ended, the Freedmen’s Bureau took a role in supporting the already established schools and in creating new ones. Blacks began moving off the plantations and into towns and cities so that their children could receive an education. One salutary effect of this was to encourage former slaveowners to establish schools on their own plantations to encourage Black workers to stay on the land.
With slavery ended, Northern free blacks moved South to join the corps of teachers. Prior to 1864, they risked capture by Confederates and enslavement if they had entered Union-held parts of the Confederacy. Now they could travel with at least some protections. Blacks who had learned literacy in slavery joined them in setting up schools in underserved areas. While the image of the Freedmen’s school teacher is often that of a white New England woman, Freedmen were taught by a wide variety of people. Northern Blacks, literate freepeople and freedpeople from the South, Union army officers, German immigrants who had settled in the South before the war were all part of the make-shift educational infrastructure at the dawn of freedom.
By 1868 the majority of teachers in Freedmen’s schools were people of color. In Virginia, for example, there were 837 Black teachers and 818 white teachers. The majority of these Black teachers were from the South. Black Southerners played an ever-growing role in freedpeople’s education.
The reaction of Southern whites to Freedmen’s schools was complex. Some saw the schools as part of an effort to end white supremacy and replace it with Black supremacy. Many whites could not envision a future in which one race or the other was not dominant. The schools were viewed by some as an existential threat to white governance and identity.
Because state-wide systems of public education simply did not exist in the South, many poor whites had never attended school. Some resented Blacks learning to read when whites remained illiterate and militated against schools for freedpeople. Others demanded schools for white children as well, but ones which excluded Blacks.
Southern white opponents of freedmen’s education often couched their racial animus in the veil of simply recognizing reality. One newspaper Williams cites predicts the extinction of the Black race, but says that while waiting for the naturally occurring inevitable dying of of those of African descent, whites should oppose the schooling of Blacks. Williams writes that:
The editors claimed not to object to black people being taught, but they thought it important that southern whites “endeavor to direct their education.” Books would be of little use to these people in their “primitive condition.” Rather, blacks should be taught first and foremost that work was their most important duty. The editors believed that freedpeople should learn that “their children will become much more useful, and will be much more highly esteemed if they are instructed as to their duty in this respect, instead of being the recipients of a smattering of an education, which they can not appreciate and which will only render them unhappy and disappointed because of the social status to which their flat noses, kinky hair, and thick lips have consigned them.” According to the newspaper, freedpeople needed to realize that their race would never reach a social position in which “polite education” would be of any use. It was best for them to “believe that through labor they may become in their own peculiar sphere a worthy and respected people.” This caustic view of African American’s position in southern society was not uncommon; for as determined as freedpeople were to use schooling to get access to power, many southern whites were equally determined to hold on to their own power and to “teach” black people that emancipation had not freed them from perpetual roles as laborers. (p. 180)
What Black mother would hesitate to place the education in the hands of the white readers of this newspaper?
Leaders of the missionary schools and the Freedmen’s Bureau worried that poor white children would be left behind. Most of the schools they set up after the war admitted children of all races and after a couple of years of operation there were hundreds of white children in the schools, learning beside their Black fellows.
Some of the teachers and administrators saw this as a harbinger of a genuine revolution in social relations in which children of all races would be mixed together and a sea change in race relations would begin. But, rather than a new beginning, the integrated classrooms turned out to be a quickly ended experiment. Most white parents, no matter how poor, would not send their children to school with Blacks. They would rather have illiterate children than children with Black friends.
Those white parents who valued education over white supremacy were harassed by other whites as traitors to their race.
In Beaufort, South Carolina, white parents saw the benefits of the freedmen’s school there and asked the missionary association to establish a white school. The association informed the parents that the freedmen’s school was already open to white students, but this made no impression on the parents. Worried that the white children were being left behind in ignorance, the missionaries sent a teacher to instruct the white students. This set off protests from Beaufort’s African American community who complained that an organization originally set up by abolitionists to aid escaped slaves was now supporting the efforts of a “whites only” school. Williams describes this little-known conflict:
In March 1867 the “Colored Citizens of Beaufort” drafted a memorial to the American Missionary Association that challenged the AMA’S support of a school that excluded black students. The AMA, the group charged, pretended to be a friend to black people but made distinctions based on race and drove them away from the door of the white school like dogs. “This school create a great deal of hurt feelings among the colored people both young and old. The cause of it they have been to that school and they were turn up at the door and by doing that it has been the instigation of white children thinking they are better than colored.” (p. 190-191)
As Radical Reconstruction began to take hold in the South, states created publicly funded schools under the common-school system. These schools were typically to have a six to ten month school term. Conservatives opposed to the schools insisted that only schools for whites should be funded by taxes and that even those schools should only be in session for four months out of the year.
Williams describes the reaction of one group of white paramilitaries to the opening of a school:
the Ku Klux Klan in Winston County, Mississippi, ordered white, native Mississippian John Avery to close his school for white children. According to Wells, the Klan told Avery that the “free-school system could not be put in force in this State, and that no man should teach in that county, under this school system, as the Ku-Klux Klan had received orders from general headquarters to demolish the school-houses, and drive out the teachers.” The Klansmen assured Avery that they were his friends and that they issued their warning in a friendly manner. Avery discontinued the school, and the Klan burned down the building. The Klan next visited a member of the school’s board of trustees to reinforce the message. Klan members demanded of him the certificates from the school fund, built a bonfire, and burned them. Further, they advised the board member that the recently enacted public school system was a “scheme gotten up by the radicals of the State to educate the negroes so that they might be more than equal with the whites; that they might become superior to the whites, and then terrorize and rule over the whites.” (p. 195)
Better to keep everyone in ignorance than to allow for the possibility that Black children might prove to be the academic equals of whites.
The author presents a history of Black literacy, and Southern white resistance to Black education, over a half-century of our history. The story is told through a series of case studies from areas throughout the South. I was left wondering at times just how representative each example was.
The creation of the public school in the South was one of the greatest and most lasting achievements of Reconstruction. Where virtually no schools had been in 1860, scores of public schools proliferated in each Southern state by 1868. While some gains were rolled back by the Redeemers, public schools continue to this day in many parts of the South.
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