Read Climbing Up to Glory Online
Authors: Wilbert L. Jenkins
Climbing Up to Glory (23 page)
“GET US SOME EDUCATION”
The Efforts of Blacks to Educate Themselves
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MOST SLAVEHOLDERS FEARED the consequences of educating their slaves. Since Southern white society was built on the false premise of white superiority, it was in the owners' best interest to keep slaves ignorant and therefore less likely to challenge white authority. Although Julia Frazier's owner did not threaten her with bodily harm, she nevertheless intimidated her. It was not unusual for her mistress to watch her to make sure that Julia did not open any books while she was cleaning the library. But her master went further: he “would close up all de books an' put âem on de shelf so's she couldn't see âem.”
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Freedman William Henry Towns recalled that if they were to “talk er' bout learninâ ter reed and rite why ef we so much as spoke uv learnin' to read and rite we was scolded like de debil [devil].” Even worse, “If we was caught lookin' in er book we was treated same as ef we had killed somebody.”
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Indeed, slaves realized both the significance and the harsh realities of learning. Elijah Cox pointed out that if they picked up a newspaper, “they were whipped for that too.”
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“If Missus Betsy caught a nigger wid a piece o' paper up next to his eyes, she'd talk âbout bustin' his brains out,” maintained Frances Willis.
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Lizzie Williams remembered the severe punishment of a woman named Nancy who could read and write. When her owner discovered her accomplishment, he “whipped her an den slapped hot irons to her all over” her naked body.
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While most slaveowners forbade instruction, others actively encouraged and supported the literacy of their slaves. They deemed literacy necessary for Christian salvation and thus permitted Bible reading. Some apparently thought that since instruction would counter ignorance, it was the right course of action to take. Still others taught their slaves to read and write in order for them to carry out certain tasks. Harrison Beckett recalled a school on the plantation where he resided, where “Dey teach âem manners an' behavier too.” Sometimes, he noted, “Dey git a broke-down white man to be de teacher. Dey try not to let de chillun come up so ignânant.”
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Echoing similar sentiments, Robert Laird said that “Marse Jones had us slaves taught how to read an' write. He didn't want us not to know nothin'.”
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Mariah Synder's master hired a black man to teach the plantation slaves their ABCs.
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Moreover, the masters of Elige Davison, Minerva Bratcher, and Cornelia Robinson took it upon themselves to teach slaves how to read and write.
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Davison's owner wanted to be able to send him on errands, and one of the other owners instructed his slave so he could copy the names and addresses of patients.
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Regardless of the circumstances, it appears that the driving force behind the promotion of literacy to blacks by whites was not humanitarianism but self-interest.
Another means by which slaves could be taught was through the aid of Southern white children. Accounts in the slave narratives reveal that both white children and slave youth were aware of the threat of punishment by white adults, because in describing how they learned to read and write from white children they used words such as “slipped” and “secretly.” Susan Merritt recalled that since her young mistress liked her, she tried to teach her. “She would slip to my room, and had me doinâ right good. I learned my alphabet.” Unfortunately, the young girl's mother discovered what they had been up to. “She lammed me over the head with the butt of a cowhide whip and tell Miss Bessie that she would cowhide her if she caught her learnin' me anything.” In her owner's opinion, “Niggers don't need to know anythin.”
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Aware of the dire consequences of discovery, Susie King Taylor's white playmate, Katie, offered her lessons if she would not tell Mr. O'Connor, her father.
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In this way, Taylor learned how to read and write. She was more fortunate than Susan Merritt, however, since her playmate's mother was aware of what was going on but chose not to interfere.
If white children were unwilling to instruct black youths, then the slaves found practical and creative ways of learning. Lizzie Atkins, for example, began to read and write by observing white children as they were being taught: “I would come and watch while they was telling their children their lessons in their home by the light from the fire-place.”
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When Frederick Douglass was no longer given lessons by his owner's wife, he devised a clever scheme to further his education. When he met a white child who could read and write, he would say that he himself could do so. “The next word would be, don't believe you. Let me see you try.” Although Douglass knew only four letters of the alphabet, he wrote them down and challenged the boy to top that. “In this way,” he recalled “I got a good many lessons in writing.”
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In another ploy, Morgan Ray tells the story of how his stepfather learned to write his name. When he was a boy, he was sent to carry the books for the white children attending school. “On de way home he would get de chillun to write different things on a slate er on de ground by bettin âem dey couldn't do it.” By the time that his stepfather's trick was found out, he had already learned to spell out his name.
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Slaves and free blacks with the ability to read and write often taught other blacks as well as some whites. Frederick Douglass, for example, who had struggled to learn, wanted to enlighten his fellow slaves. Accordingly, he organized a school for blacks and soon had between twenty and thirty eager students. In observing his pupils, Douglass wrote, “it was surprising with what ease they provided themselves with spelling-books.”
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Jerry Cook's father taught his two oldest sons, but Cook never had the opportunity to benefit from his father's literacy.
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Mark Oliver recounted the way that he and other slaves on the plantation where he resided learned how to read and write. His master purchased some slaves from Cincinnati who had worked in the households of whites. Upon their arrival on the plantation, these literate slaves “passed on to us what they knew.”
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Because education was forbidden to slaves either formally or informally, it became one of the prizes that freed people struggled hardest to acquire. Through their daily interactions with whites, they had seen the advantages that education conferred.
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As a community, blacks were proud of those who had learned to read or write in slavery and held them in high regard.
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Upon emancipation, most former slaves, old and young alike, wanted to learn how to read so that they could read at least the Bible. One elderly freedman, sitting beside his grandchild in a Mobile, Alabama, school, told a reporter from the North that he did not want to “trouble the lady much, but he must learn to read the Bible and the New Testament.”
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Others wanted to be able to defend their newly gained political rights. For instance, if black men could read their ballots, it would be more difficult for whites to manipulate their votes. Moreover, since the Freedmen's Bureau insisted on written contracts between planters and former slaves, these workers needed basic literacy to protect themselves from labor contracts designed to deliberately confuse and entrap them. Thus, when asked why she was determined to learn to read and write, one freedwoman replied, “so that the Rebs can't cheat me.”
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Freedmen did not assume that education would bring them easy riches or equality, but they knew that it could give substance to their liberty.
TEACHING THE FREEDMEN, 1866.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
Although some Southern states voiced support for black education, the financial aid given by most governments was considerably less than what was needed. The Freedmen's Bureau provided no funds for the education of freedmen until the summer of 1866, and that support amounted to only $500,000.
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But the Bureau, along with Northern benevolent societies, did provide valuable services. In the early stages of Reconstruction, they sent more than 1,000 people to the South to teach freedmen and their children, donated books, and contributed thousands of dollars to build schools and pay teachers. Nevertheless, government support and the charitable efforts of Northerners continued to lag behind the actual need. The New England Freedmen's Aid Society, for example, only offered funds to blacks who built, repaired, and cared for schools, furnished board for teachers, and paid small tuition fees. Moreover, the guiding assumptions shared by many who managed Northern benevolent societies were expressed by Edward Everett Hale, who stated that “the policy has not been to make those people beggarsââAide-toi et Dieu t'aidera' [Help yourself and God will help you] is their motto. The black people know they must support themselves, as they have always done.”
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Consequently, the twin burdens of financing and operating the freedmen's schools fell in some part on the shoulders of the former slaves themselves.
Free blacks from the South and the North committed themselves to the education of former slaves. Among those from the South were Francis L. Cardozo, William O. Weston, J. Sasportas, Henry S. Spencer, Francis Rollin, and Harriet and Richard Holloway, most of whom were light-skinned members of Charleston's black aristocracy. Some were teachers who had been educated in antebellum Charleston and had run private schools for free blacks in the pre-Civil War period.
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Other Southern free blacks included Robert Fitzgerald of Delaware, John Oliver of Virginia, and John Overton of North Carolina. Among those sent down from the North by private benevolent organizations and the federally funded Freedmen's Bureau were Jonathan Gibbs, Virginia C. Green, Blanche Harris, Franklin Randolph, Clara Duncan, Sara G. Stanley, Charlotte Forten, Sallie Daffin, and Edmonia G. Highgate. They, too, were mostly light-skinned and had all been educated in Northern schools.
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Black teachers were so strongly committed to advancing the cause of their race that they were willing, as Blanche Harris wrote from Mississippi, “to suffer many things” in order to see their race elevated.
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Despite their light skin and privileged education, many black teachers were subjected to racism. After it was discovered that Clara Duncan was black during the train ride to her post in Virginia in 1864, she was called a “nigger wench,” refused meal service, and forced to ride in a separate compartment.
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In a letter to the American Missionary Association (AMA), Duncan wrote that despite the hardships she was enduring, she was “prepared to give up everything even life for the good of the cause, and count it not a hardship but an honor and blessing to me.”
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Edmonia Highgate, though in danger of falling ill with yellow fever or even being shot, proclaimed, “I must do or die for my freed brethren.”
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Sallie Daffin turned down teaching jobs near her home in Philadelphia, where wages were higher and facilities better than anywhere in the South. She wrote instead to the AMA that she would “never teach in the North again after realizing the needs of her race in the South.”
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Remembering these efforts, black scholar W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1920, “After the [Civil] War the sacrifice of Negro women for freedom and uplift is one of the finest chapters in their history.”
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Helping to prepare the newly freed slaves for their new position in society merely reflected the long-standing tradition of self-help maintained by North American blacks.
Some former black officers in the Union army also contributed to the cause of black education. William H. Holland, for example, after his tour of duty, attended Oberlin College and then returned home to Texas to teach school. Holland's interest in politics led to his successful campaign for the state legislature as a member of the Republican Party. As a Texas legislator he helped to establish Prairie View Normal School (now called Prairie View A & M), and the Texas State Institute for Deaf and Blind Black Youth, which he ran for fourteen years. Two black former army surgeons, Alexander T. Augusta and Charles B. Purvis, practiced in hospitals in Washington, DC, that catered to blacks. Both men also taught at the Howard Medical School for many years, remaining there even though they received no pay for their services when Howard fell on hard times. When the local affiliate of the American Medical Association refused to admit them because they were black, Augusta and Purvis formed the National Medical Association for black physicians.
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Although many Northern and Southern whites took teaching jobs in schools for blacks in the South during the Reconstruction period, a large majority of black parents preferred black teachers for their children. Underscoring this sentiment, Methodist minister Thomas W. Stringer wrote from Vicksburg, “Our people will not be satisfied until they have colored teachers.”
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In Charleston in 1867 the Reverend Richard Cain underscored the psychological, emotional, and practical benefits of black teachers: “Honest, dignified whites, may teach ever so well, it has not the effect to exalt the black man's opinion of his own race, because they have always been in the habit of seeing white men in honored positions, and respected; but when the colored man, his fellow, comes upon the stage, and does the honorable work, exhibits the same great comprehension of facts, this ocular proof to the mind of that class, is tenfold more convincing, and gives an exalted opinion of the race.”
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Similarly, James Walker Hood paid homage to the “noble, self-sacrificing devotion” of white teachers from the North, but he maintained that he would always work toward “colored teachers for colored schools.”
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Blacks regarded many white teachers as racists, whether consciously or unconsciously so, and thought their children, only recently freed from enslavement to whites, should have black men and women as teachers and authority figures.
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Adding more credence to the value of black teachers was the racism and paternalism of white members of Northern benevolent societies. A leading critic of these benevolent societies was Frederick Douglass, who noted in 1865 that “these groups tended to give blacks pity and not justice.”
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The organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the
Christian Recorder,
published in 1865 a scathing editorial on the glaring disparity between the principles and practices of some Northern white missionaries. The
Recorder
condemned those missionaries “who while in the North make loud pretension to Abolition, [but] when they get South partake so largely of that contemptible prejudice that they are ashamed to be seen in company with colored men.”
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Not surprisingly, blacks wanted the schools to encourage racial pride in their children as well as to educate themâthat is, freedmen wanted to use education to further liberate themselves from the control of whites. Only black teachers and black school boards could put control of the education of freedmen where it rightfully belonged: in the black community itself.
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