Literacy and Liberation

Heather Andrea Williams. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 320 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

To educate an African American slave was to break the law. If slaves pursued literacy on their own, they were threatened with punishment, sale, or worse. Despite these outstanding risks, slave did, in fact, learn to read and through this learning, they developed new strategies to gain freedom. This is Heather Andrea Williams's argument in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, a book that eloquently places African Americans at the center of the struggle for education, establishment of schools, and teaching despite the daunting legal, economic, and societal barriers that confronted them in the American South.

Williams begins her study by asking: how did generations of African American slaves learn how to read and write and then employ their literacy on a crusade for freedom before and after the Civil War? Using classic, bottom-up, social history, Williams addresses that question by drawing from sources that give voice to otherwise silenced African Americans. As one of the few monographs on the history of African American education, Williams' book provides important insight into the long quest for education from the viewpoint of a largely illiterate and disenfranchised population. Like James D. Anderson's groundbreaking book, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, Williams takes a broad look at African American education, drawing out the collective experiences of African Americans in the South. This is a much-needed contribution to a historical field whose landscape is otherwise dotted with single case studies of African American teachers and schools. Cutting across traditional periodization, Williams examines the pursuit of education during slavery, the Civil War, and the first decade of freedom. Using military records, slave narratives, autobiographies, black college archives, and records of the Freedmen's Bureau, Williams engages both white and African American voices, although she admits that she often had to find the stories of African Americans in what she calls the "negative spaces" (p. 2). In the end, Williams provides her readers with a dynamic story about the simultaneous pursuits of education and freedom that began during slavery and continued through the Civil War and after Emancipation.

In nine chapters and an epilogue, Williams demonstrates the ways in which African American slaves and freedpeople embraced literacy as a means of self-determination and liberation. However, Williams is quick to remind readers that African Americans were not monolithic and neither were the meanings that they attached to the struggle for literacy. Williams divides her subjects into groups of slaves; soldiers and chaplains during the Civil War; and organizers, teachers, and freedpeople in the postwar South. Each of these three groups assigned respective definitions and strategies to their pursuit of education. For slaves, the desire into read translated to the desire to be free, but literacy had important practical applications as well, including recording children's births, reading the Bible, and, in the case of A. T. Jones, a means to forge a pass that helped him escape to freedom. During the Civil War, literacy distinguished soldiers and chaplains as leaders who could teach others how to read. In the postwar South, education took on new meaning as a launching pad for African American political participation and organizing. First, in nighttime meetings, then in larger conventions, African Americans called for civil rights, including jury service and suffrage.

Just as strategies to gain literacy changed over time, so did the meaning of freedom. What was primarily an individual effort among slaves became a wider community concern after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. By the end of her study, Williams shows that after Emancipation, African Americans redefined freedom in terms of a community's level of self-determination, including the ability to build schools, support African American teachers to decrease dependency on the cadres of white northern teachers, and engage in political activities. Such efforts, Williams ultimately argues...