"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is one of the spirituals associated with the Underground Railroad. The earliest known recording was in 1909, by the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University.   The connections between Fisk, slavery, and the Underground Railroad made this seem like the perfect soundtrack for this webpage.

Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education.  It was a whole race trying to go to school.  Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.  As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night-schools as well.  The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died.  With this end in view, men and women who were fifty and seventy-five years old, would be found in night-schools.  Sunday-schools were formed soon after freedom, but the principal book studied in the Sunday-school was the spelling-book.  Day-school, night-school, and Sunday-school were always crowded, and often many had to be turned away for want of room.    
                                         ~Booker T. Washington

Theme II, "They Want Efx": Centering the Roles of Black Language and Literacy, begins with the 18th and 19th centuries and a very important text: Self-Taught by Andrea Williams.  Without at least a nod in the direction of this foundational history, we cannot possibly richly contextualize Black language, literacy, and rhetoric in the 20th and 21st centuries.  
 
A significant stream of research challenges the once strongly-held belief that enslaved Africans simply mimicked white slaveowners’ language, mores, and values or were so desolate and isolated that they had no expressions of their own.[1] While Frederick Douglass’s struggles for literacy are legendary in literary, literacy, and writing studies, a deliberate and conscious connection to literacy during slavery--- which was both celebratory and suspicious [2]--- was not exclusive to the extraordinary life and works of Douglass alone.  Reward advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews with former slaves, slaveowners’ diaries, individual biographies, records of abolitionist schools, clandestine activities of African American freedmen/freedwomen’s schools, the work of religious societies, and stories that came to light during Reconstruction all reveal complex relationships to and acquisitions of literacy for enslaved Africans that defy any notion that literate slaves were rare or few in number.[3]  The connections between literacy, democracy, equality, and the status of African Americans have always been intimately intertwined ” [4].
 
It was the demands made by African Americans for free, public education that became the impetus for the system of public education that was established in the United States after the Civil War. Up until that point, public education as we know it today, did not exist [5].  Newly emancipated African Americans had the clearest agenda and sense of importance of education and thus, cleared the path for everyone else to have access to public education.[6]  As Horace Mann Bond noted, no other group strove for education, and especially literacy, as much as bBlack people after the Civil War.[8]  African American men who had enlisted in the Union army became teachers in local communities when the Civil War ended, started their own schools, bought their own books, and hired their own teachers.[9]  Even those schools officially labeled American missionary schools were rightly Freedpeople’s schools given the role formerly enslaved Africans played in conceiving the schools, building them, and paying for their attendance there. Adults, some as old as 108, attended school with their children and grandchildren and, in essence, initiated the adult education movement.[10]  In Savannah, Georgia alone, formerly enslaved subjects became Black ministers and created their own Black Education Association; they started over 100 schools within two years, controlling their own curriculum design and teacher hiring and training.[11]  Archaeologists 100 years after slavery were still surprised that they found so many pencils and writing slates in the slave cabins they excavated.[12]  Literacy was “how you constructed yourself as a free person.”[13]

Heather Williams’s book, Self-Taught, critically situates these issues by covering the history of what can, arguably, only be described as the most triumphant and valiant struggle for education and literacy in the United States.  As you read chapter one from Self-Taught, ask yourself these questions:

1. What difference does this history make? 
2. What difference does my hearing and seeing this history make? 
3. What does this history have to do with African American rhetoric and/or African American philosophies of communication?

Try and avoid the tempting lament that African Americans and/or today's youth/communities no longer value reading and writing like they did in slavery and freedom. Remember that by 1900, only about 34 states had laws (which were not enforced) that even required children to go to school and only four of those states were in the South (where most African Americans lived).   Let’s think about how and why so many enslaved Africans pursued education at a time when such schooling was not linked with job, financial career success the way they are for you in the 21st century.  Try not to apply this 21st century lens of schooling onto the 19th century.  Instead, ask yourself: what and where are those moments when the dispositions and pursuits of African Americans in reading, writing, and speaking move past the quest for status, prestige, or social mobility but exist instead as a way to demand recognition, full humanity, and political sovereignty?  That’s how we need to understand and apply, if you will, the history Williams documents.

Click on image below for reading assignment!

We do not own the rights to this essay.  It is being used here for educational purposes only in the hopes that it helps other undergraduate students. This webpage will be password-protected as needed.

Heather Andrea Williams

Since receiving her Ph.D. in 2002, she has established herself as one of the top scholars specializing in the study of slavery and African American history in the 18th and 19th century American South. Her book Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom won the Lillian Smith Book Award 2006 of the Southern Regional Council; American Educational Research Association New Scholar’s Book Award 2005-2006; George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book Prize for 2005, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing; Honor Book 2006, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and, Honorable Mention 2006, History of Education Society Book Prize. 

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You can also click here for Chapter One of Self-Taught by Heather Andrea Williams 

[1]Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979).
[2] Shevaun E. Watson, “‘Good Will Come of This Evil’: Enslaved Teachers and the Transatlantic Politics of Early Black Literacy,”  College Composition and Communication 61.1 (September 2009): W66-89.
[3] Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); John Blassingame, ed.  Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1977); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1975)
[4] Cornelius, 2.
[5] Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1901), 29-30.
[6] He uses the metaphor of the Old Roman Ship to capture this history: blacks rowed at the bottom and whites rode comfortably on top while all the work was being done down below. Robin Kelley, Personal Interview, Spring 2002.
[7] Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5.
[8] Horace Mann Bond, Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Octagon Books, 1966.)
[9] Ira Berlin, Ed. Freedom: A Document History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.  Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
[11] Ronald Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (Chapel Hill, 1980).
[12] Theresa Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slave Life,” in Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South, ed. Edward Campbell and Kym Rice (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991).
[13] Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III, Young, Gift, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students (New York: Beacon Press, 2004), 92.