Self-Taught
African American Education in Slavery and Freedom

Heather Andrea Williams (Author)

9780807858219

Paperback / softback, published 26 February 2007

320 pages
23.4 x 16.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.449 kg

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.