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Heather Williams on "Acquiring Literacy, Acquiring Freedom"
Heather Williams, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will speak at Ohio State on "Acquiring Literacy, Acquiring Freedom: Education Among Enslaved and Freedpeople in the American South." Williams, a former attorney with the U.S Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office, teaches and writes about African Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, particularly in the American South.
According to Williams, many enslaved people placed a very high value on acquiring literacy and took risks to make it a reality. They broke the laws that southern states enacted to punish them for learning to read and write. They bribed white men and boys to teach them their letters. They often linked literacy to religion, family, and freedom. Literacy enabled them to read the Bible, to write and read letters that kept family members connected when the slave trade separated them, and to forge passes that enabled them to gain freedom. Once slavery ended, literate black people taught large numbers of freed women, men, and children who filled churches and schoolhouses. Many African Americans believed that literacy was essential to their participation in the political and economic life of the nation. This was how they would get access to the vote and thereby influence how they would be treated. At great financial and sometimes physical sacrifice, they built schoolhouses that might be burned down and risked beatings from those who believed education would unfit former slaves for the labor that had built the economy of the United States. Literacy, African Americans believed, would enable them to shape their lives after slavery and to make freedom meaningful.
Williams is currently researching the separation of African American families during the antebellum period and subsequent attempts to reunify families following emancipation. This work will consider, among other things, the process of mourning or grieving after separation, methods for keeping track of family members over distance and time, African American marriage following the war and the larger society's reception of the idea of legalizing black marriages.
