African American Education

Education in Slavery

Although art and culture had been an integral part of their lives in Africa, the Africans forcibly brought to the United States from 1619 on found opportunities to expand their minds were actively limited. While their technical classification at this time was as indentured servants, their journey was not voluntary, and, unlike White indentured servants, their term of service had no time limit. The fear that an educated Black population would be a rebellious one led to the proliferation of laws against educating Blacks across the South beginning in 1680 in Virginia.

By the mid-1800s most Southern states had enacted laws prohibiting Black literacy, which often applied to free Blacks as well. While much focus is on the South's role at this time, Black children attempting to enter White schools in the North often met with hostility and even violence. The Roberts v. Boston (1949) decision upholding school segregation in Boston would later serve as precedent for the Supreme Court's sanction of segregated public schools nationwide in 1896.

The concern over Black literacy in the South may have had some merit since many successful escapees and leaders of slave rebellions were literate. The penalty for learning to read and write varied, but included having a thumb or forefinger removed, being whipped, and in some cases, even death. The vigilance with which these laws were enforced merely served to strengthen the resolve among many Black people to learn to read and write. Across the nation many Black people learned to read and write in any way they could—often teaching themselves, learning secretly at night or in clandestine schools, and even taking informal lessons from the school-age children of White slave owners. Booker T. Washington taught himself to read while enslaved, remarking that the prohibited nature of learning to read only further fueled his curiosity and tenacity to do so.

The Postwar Years and Reconstruction

After their emancipation and the end of slavery in 1865, the thirst for an education among the newly freed people was acute; however, the Black community quickly found that obtaining an education would still be a difficult task. The value of an education was well known to the Black community, especially when it came time to negotiate labor contracts and settle prices for their crops after harvest. The ease with which illiterate Blacks could be taken advantage of was another motivation to push for an education.

...