Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News Editorials & Other Articles General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

elleng

(136,099 posts)
Fri Jan 14, 2022, 06:30 PM Jan 2022

EDUCATION OF THE ENSLAVED WAS A CRIME,

90% ILLITERACY RATE,MULTI-GENERATIONS POVERTY.
READING WAS/IS THE FIRST STEP TO SELF EMPOWERMENT

“Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education. Before the war, every Southern state except Tennessee had prohibited the instruction of slaves, and while many free blacks had attended school and a number of slaves became literate through their own efforts or the aid of sympathetic masters, over 90 percent of the South’s adult black population was illiterate in 1860.

Access to education for themselves and their children was, for blacks, central to the meaning of freedom, and white contemporaries were astonished by their “avidity for learning.” A Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported in 1865 that when he informed a gathering of 3,000 freedmen that they “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds.

They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness.” The desire for learning led parents to migrate to towns and cities in search of education for their children, and plantation workers to make the establishment of a school-house “an absolute condition” of signing labor contracts.

. (One 1867 Louisiana contract specified that the planter pay a “5 per cent tax” to support black education.)
Adults as well as children thronged the schools established during and after the Civil War. A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, “just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of any thing but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.”
***Eric Foner,Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Business

1 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
EDUCATION OF THE ENSLAVED WAS A CRIME, (Original Post) elleng Jan 2022 OP
Volunteer teaching to motivated students keithbvadu2 Jan 2022 #1

keithbvadu2

(40,138 posts)
1. Volunteer teaching to motivated students
Fri Jan 14, 2022, 07:03 PM
Jan 2022

A friend of mine, high school English teacher, did some volunteer teaching in China for 3 weeks. A village of 1 million people, 3 hour plane ride west of a major city. She lived in the dormitory with the students and lived on rice and watermelon. She did not like the fish heads. She said the students would come up to her the next day and say; look Miss T, look Miss T, my notebook, my new words. She said they were ultra eager to learn English, unlike her high school students, both black and white, here in America.

Latest Discussions»Culture Forums»American History»EDUCATION OF THE ENSLAVED...