| Through my examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century literacy campaigns and African American periodicals, I trace the history, meaning, and relevance of an ideology particular to African Americans that associates literacy with freedom and racial uplift, a theme that has its origins in the slave narrative tradition. Archival sources reflecting the black community's history with literacy learning provide an understanding of the nature of this longstanding literacy ideology. Census records, literacy narratives, editorials and government reports verify the scale of this movement in the black community at the turn of the century. I will explore the potential for literacy myths to be "transformed and redirected," as Harvey Graff argues in his reflection on The Literacy Myth.;Factors such as the impact of a history of oppression, unequal access to education, and the activism of the A.M.E. church have shaped a revolutionary moral basis of literacy within the black community in ways that have been typically misunderstood. Despite the dominant cultural myth which claims that literacy can bring about economic and social uplift, marginalized people have long been aware of literacy's limited potential to facilitate economic empowerment. For example, the nationwide debate over the need to teach Greek and Latin in black common schools demonstrates the contradictory nature of our mainstream literacy myth. African Americans' forward-thinking literacy ideology, which took literacy's contradictions into account, made way for a visionary writing practice that galvanized the black community for the purpose of bringing about social change. The history of the African-American quest for literacy and freedom during the Progressive Era, 1890--1919, presents a story of literacy's role in African Americans' struggle for self-determination and self-definition.;This history has informed African-American literacy practices as well as the way literacy has operated as a rhetorical object in black scholarly and popular writing. Following the work of Literacy Studies scholars Deborah Brandt, Katie Clinton, and Jacqueline Jones Royster, I also explore the tensions inherent within a literacy myth that seeks to intervene in the global forces and local circumstances that mediate access to and the usefulness of the act of reading and writing. |
