Part 17 (2/2)

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_, p 148]

[Footnote 3: Fee, _Antislavery Manual_, p 149]

CHAPTER IX

LEARNING IN SPITE OF OPPOSITION

Discouraging as these conditions seemed, the situation was not entirely hopeless The education of the colored people as a public effort had been prohibited south of the border States, but there was still soe

Furthermore, the liberal white people of that section considered these enactments, as we have stated above, not applicable to southerners interested in the improvement of their slaves but to mischievous abolitionists The truth is that thereafter soht worthy slaves who an elementary education As these prohibitions in slave States were not equally stringent, white and colored teachers of free blacks were not always disturbed In fact, just before theat the violation of the reactionary laws that it looked as if soht recede froroes be educated as they had been in the eighteenth century

The ways in which slaves thereafter acquired knowledge are significant Many picked it up here and there, so, and others learned from slaves whose attainments were unknown to their roes not only the rudi they wanted to learn Not a few slaves were instructed by the white children who ministers and officials whose work often lay open to their servants, many of the race learned by contact and observation

Shrewd Negroes sometimes slipped stealthily into back streets, where they studied under a private teacher, or attended a school hidden froroes struggling to obtain an education read like the beautiful roroes of the type of Lott Carey[1] educated themselves Jareat numbers of slaves had learned to read well Many of thee of arithmetic ”But,” said he, ”blazon it to the shae thus acquired has been snatched from the spare records of leisure in spite of their owners' wishes and watchfulness”[2] CG Parsons was inforh poor masters did not venture to teach their slaves, occasionally one with a thirst for knowledge secretly learned the rudiments of education without any instruction[3] While on a tour through parts of Georgia, EP Burke observed that, notwithstanding the great precaution which was taken to prevent the e enough to enable them to read and write with ease”[4]

Robert Smalls[5] of South Carolina and Alfred T Jones[6] of Kentucky began their education in this raphical Sketches_, p 87]

[Footnote 2: Redpath, _Roving Editor_, etc, p 161]

[Footnote 3: Parsons, _Inside View_, etc, p 248]

[Footnote 4: Burke, _Reia_, p 85]

[Footnote 5: Siee_, p 152]

Probably the best example of this class was Harrison Ellis of Alabae of thirty-five he had acquired a liberal education by his own exertions Upon exaood Latin and Hebrew scholar and showed still greater proficiency in Greek His attainhly satisfactory _The Eufaula shi+eld_, a newspaper of that State, praised him as a man courteous in manners, polite in conversation, andhow useful Ellis would be in a free country, the Presbyterian Synod of Alabama purchased hiht use his talents in elevating his own people in Liberia[1]

[Footnote 1: _Niles Register_, vol lxxi, p 296]

Intelligent Negroes secretly communicated to their fellow inia, was taught by his brother-in-law to read, but not write[1] The father of Benedict Duncan, a slave in Maryland, taught his son the alphabet[2] MW

Taylor of Kentucky received his first instruction frooner learned from his parents the first principles of the coht John H Ses of five and seven[4] The ht hie that he does not remember when he first developed that power[5] Dr EC

Morris, President of the National Baptist Convention, belonged to a Georgia family, all of ell instructed by his father[6]

[Footnote 1: Drew, _Refugee_, etc, p 72]

[Footnote 2: Ibid, p 110]

[Footnote 3: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p 679]

[Footnote 4: Ibid, p 873]