When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South / Edition 1

by Janet Duitsman Cornelius

Overview

This is the first study to focus on the roots of slavery in the African-American drive for literacy and schooling that exploded immediately after the American Civil War. The author examines why blacks valued literacy, how it played an integral part in the black church, and how it served as an instrument of political resistance in the African-American community under slavery. Cornelius also explores the complexities and contradictions in the roles played by early southern slaveholders who used literacy as a barrier between black and white, slave and free. While legal restrictions against teaching slaves to read were less extensive than commonly thought, sanctions were brutal and pervasive. However, despite the threat of grim punishments, enslaved African-Americans did learn to read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872498716
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/31/1992
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	215
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janet Duitsman Cornelius is Professor of History and Chair of the Liberal Arts Division at Danville Area Community College in Danville, Illinois. She is also Adjunct Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University and has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in 1977 on the antebellum southern white evangelical mission to slaves.

What People are Saying About This

The Virginia Quarterly

This poignant and notable study examines not only why antebellum blacks so valued literacy, but how literacy played a central role in both the black church and in political resistance.

Chicago Tribune

... a distinctive volume revealing yet again America's often-contradictory dance with freedom and the concepts of equality and inalienable rights. It provides a forceful background for understanding contemporary literacy issues and, more generally, the status of schooling and intellectual pursuits in what some now call–a mere 130 years after emancipation–a post-literate culture.

The North Carolina Historical Review

... a valuable addition to the study of southern history and a pioneer work on slave literacy.

Editorial Reviews

Cornelius, professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, shows in an academic study that encouragement from certain plantation owners, clandestine schools run by free blacks, and churches and missionary groups sponsoring Bible-reading for blacks were responsible for a considerably higher literacy level among slaves than is generally acknowledged. Diaries of abolitionists and freed slaves, and church records quoted here testify to the blacks' thirst for knowledge as a key to self-determination and emancipation. This desire, along with religious revivals of the early 1800s, alerted slave-owners to the danger of revolt and led to harsher slave codes regarding literacy. The author concludes with post-Civil War efforts to satisfy the newly freed slaves' ``greed for letters.'' Addressing the related impact of literacy and religion among slaves, the book makes a contribution to scholarship. Photos not seen by PW. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

For slaves, as for whites, literacy promised self-worth and access to scripture. Literacy meant liberation of mind and soul and sometimes even person. Literate slaves had status, often as preachers. Slaves learned to read and write by wit and deception, but also because some Christian whites taught them as part of missionary work on plantations or as a prelude to African colonization. Northern Bible and tract societies urged ``Bibles for slaves'' in the 1850s, but Southern resistance to both Northern interference and slave literacy generally limited that appeal. Still, says historian Cornelius, 10 percent of the slaves were literate. The assertion of widespread slave literacy is more speculation than fact, for it is impossible to gauge functional literacy. But Cornelius does show that the blacks' drive for education was well underway before emancipation. She draws on a variety of primary sources (slave narratives, slaveholders' diaries, church records, etc.) to support her thesis. This is a very useful book on a neglected topic. Recommended for university libraries.-- Randall Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal