Literacy and Liberation

Abstract

To educate an African American slave was to break the law. If slaves pursued literacy on their own, they were threatened with punishment, sale, or worse. Despite these outstanding risks, slave did, in fact, learn to read and through this learning, they developed new strategies to gain freedom. This is Heather Andrea Williams's argument in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, a book that eloquently places African Americans at the center of the struggle for education, establishment of schools, and teaching despite the daunting legal, economic, and societal barriers that confronted them in the American South.