The abolitionist Frederick Douglass is known for many things, but perhaps among the most significant is his views on education’s relationship to slavery. Douglass himself was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. He described in his 1845 autobiography, how one of his enslavers, Mrs. Auld, began teaching him to read when he was a child.
“Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Douglass writes. “To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master.’”
Congress enacted the 13th Amendment on Jan. 31, 1865, abolishing slavery. It was not until June 19, 1865, that word of the amendment reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, marking the origin of the Juneteenth holiday.
Today, the holiday commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. But, the story for formerly enslaved people continued to unfold in complex ways well after Juneteenth, including when it came to their educational journeys.
Juneteenth made clear that freedom was not just confined to someone’s physical enslavement, but mental enslavement as well, bound in the laws that barred enslaved people from receiving an education in Southern states.
Learning was once illegal for Black Americans
In 1739, the Stono slave rebellion took place in South Carolina. Fearing that educated slaves would go on to plot future rebellions, South Carolina passed an anti-literacy law in 1740, banning slaves from being taught how to read. Most Southern states soon followed with their own anti-literacy laws, in the hopes of preventing any further slave rebellions. These laws applied to both enslaved and free Black people.
Despite these laws, thousands of enslaved people still learned to read and write. Literacy was a means of freedom.
Juneteenth is a complicated story of formerly enslaved people’s faith and resilience, as well as white supremacists’ hate and resistance to formerly enslaved people experiencing liberation. It also offers an important reminder that true freedom must also include the right to an education.
Formerly enslaved individuals had various responses to their newfound freedom in 1865, ranging from gratitude and joy to despair and loss.
Many formerly enslaved people decided to leave the southern states. Others opted to remain where they had been enslaved. Regardless of their choices, the estimated 4 million formerly enslaved people challenged the U.S. to acknowledge their liberation and welcome them as equals. Relentlessly, they endeavored to establish themselves as free citizens within the nation. One of these newly freed people’s primary goals was to receive an education.
Emancipation opened the doors of education
After the Civil War, newly freed people gathered in churches, homes, cellars, sheds, meetinghouses and even under shade trees in the fields where they worked the crops to learn how to read and write. They also learned basic job skills, sucy as the ability to read and understand labor contracts.
Many of the teachers had no formal training, and some of them were local Black people who were self-taught. Other educators included White teachers from the South and the North, sent by churches and aid societies. White aid societies and religious organizations from the North, including the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association, sometimes funded these free schools for formerly enslaved Black people. However, most of the money to fund these schools came from the newly freed Americans, who privately paid for their schools.
While about 90% of the Black population in southern states were illiterate in 1865, that percentage dropped to 70% by 1880.
Newly freed Black people also began to have more options for higher education. The first historically Black college and university, Cheyney University, was established in Pennsylvania in 1837, well before the Civil War. A total of four HBCUs were established by the end of the Civil War in 1865. At this point, true liberation began, as a growing number of historically Black colleges and universities offered academic freedom to Black Americans. In the 15 years following the Civil War, a total of 59 HBCUs had opened their doors to Black students.
A whole new set of challenges and opportunities greeted the formerly enslaved Black Americans who sought freedom in the North. Most arrived in cities such as Chicago and New York, where they found some humanitarian support but also racial discrimination and poverty. Their lives were constantly filled with both legal and racial hostility.
Education ranked high among the free people as a priority, as they looked to gain new skills and advance in life. They learned not only the basics in reading and math, but also job skills, citizenship and advanced learning in professional careers, such as law, medicine, pharmacy and teaching.
Ultimately, Juneteenth offered a promise of freedom, but education was necessary to make it happen.
Rodney Coates is professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Miami University of Ohio. He wrote this piece for The Conversation, an independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Education fuels the promise of Juneteenth | Opinion
Reporting by Rodney Coates / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Rodney Coates | USA TODAY Network
