Ex-Slaves And The Rise Of Universal Education Summary

The United States is a country built on the principles that there should be freedom, equality, and fundamental human rights for everyone who is a resident. However, we have seen time and time again the selective inclusivity of who is worthy of these values, which results in the exclusion of racial minorities. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas as a subordinate class that would forever remain that way up until today. White Europeans were able to construct their notions of whiteness in opposition to the blackness of the enslaved Africans. Thus resulted what would become a caste system that permeated into structures such as the education system where these inequalities are reproduced.

Throughout this paper, I will outline how various

James Anderson discusses how slaves and former slaves were amongst the first people to advocate for this cause in chapter 1 of his book, “Ex-Slaves and the Rise of Universal Education in the South, 1860-1880.” Enslaved people were denied the opportunity to learn how to write, read, or be educated in general. Keeping Blacks oblivious was a malicious strategy to keep them docile in order to maintain their labor force under control and complacent. This, however, was not the case as mentioned by Anderson, since many slaves would hold literacy sessions to help each other read and write, despite this being an illegal action that could result in beatings and lashings. He then discusses how post-emancipation, former slaves founded their own schools, called native schools, which were created for and by Black people. They refused to let whites control their movement since federal organizations such as Freedman’s Bureau could not fully commit to their mission in supporting former slaves to become fully integrated. Anderson describes this as, “the ex-slaves' struggle for education was an expression of freedom. It was, as Ronald Butchart maintains, an effort of an oppressed people "to put as great a distance between themselves and bondage as possible," (Anderson 18). They were not going to let their former oppressors get in the way of their liberation and equality. Native schools and Sabbath schools are examples of how former slaves were self-sufficient and pulled their own resources, labor, and money to educate themselves. This spurred a fear amongst white folks since “The ex-slaves' initiative… presented a new challenge to the dominant class whites—the possibility of an emerging literate black working class in the midst of a largely illiterate poor white class. This constituted a frontal assault on the racist myth of black