Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [354]
Although most masters had managed to overcome their fears of religious worship among the slaves, only a very few had dared to extend such toleration to teaching blacks to read and write. “Everything must be interdicted which is calculated to render the slave discontented,” was the explanation once offered by a Supreme Court judge in Georgia for the legislative restrictions placed on black literacy. Notwithstanding the elaborate precautions and legislation, some slaves and larger numbers of freeborn blacks managed to acquire a smattering of education, whether in clandestine schools, in the several schools for the freeborn tolerated in certain communities, or because of the indulgence of a member of the master’s family. By virtue of their duties and access to the Big House, the plantation slaves most likely to have acquired a competence in reading and writing were the drivers, house servants, and artisans. Whenever the opportunity was there, some blacks had made the most of it. “These whites don’t read and write because they don’t want to,” a black preacher observed in 1865; “our people don’t, because the law and public feeling were against it. The ignorant whites had every chance to learn, but didn’t; we had every chance to remain ignorant, and many of us learned in spite of them.”43 At the time of emancipation, however, the vast majority of southern blacks were illiterate—a triumph of sorts for the masters, legislatures, and courts who had deemed such a condition essential to the internal security of their society.
Like most young slaves, Booker T. Washington had viewed the mysteries of reading and writing from a distance. But the very fact that he was forbidden these practices of white people excited his curiosity. And when his mother explained that whites considered reading too dangerous for black people, that made him even more anxious to acquire this skill. “From that moment,” he would recall, “I resolved that I should never be satisfied until I learned what this dangerous practice was like.” On several occasions, he accompanied his master’s daughter to the schoolhouse door, and the sight of the young white children inside made an impression upon him that he would never forget. “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.” That opportunity came for many young blacks in the aftermath of emancipation, though not all of them were in the best position to enjoy its benefits. After his family moved away from the farm on which they had been slaves, young Washington went to work in the salt furnaces and tried on his own to make some sense out of the spelling book his mother had acquired for him. When finally permitted to enroll in the newly opened freedmen’s school, he still had to work in the furnaces for five hours in the early morning and for two more hours after classes. Because work demands made it impossible for him to continue his studies in the day school, he enrolled in the night school, and it was there, he later recalled, that he acquired “the greater part” of his elementary education.44
Nothing could have been more calculated to impress upon slaves the value of education than the extraordinary measures adopted by their “white folks” to keep them from it. Even if blacks