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David Walker Discusses the
Education of the Negro, 1830
There is a great work for you to do, as
trifling as some of you may think of it. You have to prove to
the Americans and the world, that we are MEN, and not brutes, as
we have been represented, and by millions treated. Remember, to
let the aim of your labours among your brethren, and
particularly the youths, be the dissemination of education
and religion.
It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school,
from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen
years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about
the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a
musket—and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they
are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in
geography, and to hear them read, would only be to disgust a man
who has a taste for reading; which, to do well as trifling as it
may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great
part of learning.
Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well,
over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a
powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring
knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no more than what
nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by
the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write
a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good
learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his
father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in
point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning,
struts about, in the full assurance, that his attainments in
literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when,
in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!
I promiscuously fell into conversation once,
with an elderly coloured man on the topics of education, and of
the great prevalency of ignorance among us: Said he, "I know
that our people are very ignorant but my son has a good
education: I spent a great deal of money on his education: he
can write as well as any white man, and I assure you that no one
can fool him," etc. Said I, what else can your son do,
besides writing a good hand? Can he post a set of books in a
mercantile manner? Can he write a neat piece of composition in
prose or in verse?
To these interrogations he answered in the
negative. Said I, Did your son learn, while he was at school,
the width and depth of English Grammar? to which he also replied
in the negative, telling me his son did not learn those things.
Your son, said I, then, has hardly any learning at all—he
is almost as ignorant, and more so, than many of those who never
went to school one day in all their lives. My friend got a
little put out, and so walking off, said that his son could
write as well as any white man.
Most of the coloured people, when they speak
of the education of one among us who can write a neat hand, and
who perhaps knows nothing but to scribble and puff pretty fair
on a small scrap of paper, immaterial whether his words are
grammatical, or spelt correctly, or not; if it only looks
beautiful, they say he has as good an education as any white
man—he can write as well as any white man,
etc. The poor,
ignorant creature, hearing this, he is ashamed, forever after,
to let any person see him humbling himself to another for
knowledge but going about trying to deceive those who are more
ignorant than himself, he at last falls an ignorant victim to
death in wretchedness.
I pray that the Lord may undeceive my
ignorant brethren, and permit them to throw away pretensions,
and seek after the substance of learning. I would crawl on my
hands and knees through mud and mire, to the feet of a learned
man, where I would sit and humbly supplicate him to instill into
me, that which neither devils nor tyrants could remove, only
with my life—for the Africans to acquire learning in this
country, makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy
foundation.
Why, what is the matter? Why, they know that
their infernal deeds of cruelty will be made known to the world.
Do you suppose one man of good sense and learning would submit
himself, his father, mother, wife and children, to be slaves to
a wretched man like himself, who, instead of compensating him
for his labours, chains, handcuffs and beats him and family
almost to death, leaving life enough in them, however, to work
for, sad call him master? No! no! he would cut his devilish
throat from ear to ear, and well do slave-holders know it. The
bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel
oppressors almost to death. But if they do not have enough to be
frightened for yet, it will be because they can always keep us
ignorant, and because God approbates their cruelties, with which
they have been for centuries murdering us. The whites shall have
enough of the blacks, yet, as true as God sits on his throne in
heaven.
Some of our brethren are so very full of
learning, that you cannot mention any thing to them which they
do not know better than yourself!!-nothing is strange to them!!-
they knew every thing years ago!-if any thing should be
mentioned in company where they are, immaterial how important it
is respecting us or the world, if they had not divulged it; they
make light of it, and affect to have known it long before it was
mentioned and try to make all in the room, or wherever you may
be, believe that your conversation is nothing!!-not worth
hearing!
All this is the result of ignorance and ill-breeding;
for a man of good-breeding, sense and penetration, if he had
heard a subject told twenty times over, and should happen to be
in company where one should commence telling it again, he would
wait with patience on its narrator, and see if he would
tell it as it was told in his presence before-paying the most
strict attention to what is said, to see if any more light will
be thrown on the subject: for all men are not gifted alike in
telling, or even hearing the most simple narration. These
ignorant, vicious, and wretched men, contribute almost as much
injury to our body as tyrants themselves, by doing so much for
the promotion of ignorance amongst us; for they, making such
pretensions to knowledge, such of our youth as are seeking after
knowledge, and can get access to them, take them as criterions
to go by, who will lead them into a channel, where, unless the
Lord blesses them with the privilege of seeing their folly, they
will be irretrievably lost forever, while in time!!!
I must close this article by relating the
very heartrending fact, that I have examined school-boys and
young men of colour in different parts of the country, in the
most simple parts of Murray's English Grammar, and not more than
one in thirty was able to give a correct answer to my
interrogations. If any one contradicts me, let him step out of
his door into the streets of Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, or
Baltimore, (no use to mention any other, for the Christians are
too charitable further south or west! )-I say, let him who
disputes me, step out of his door into the streets of either of
those four cities, and promiscuously collect one hundred
school-boys, or young men of colour who have been to school,
and who are considered by the coloured people to have
received an excellent education, because, perhaps, some of them
can write a good hand, but who, notwithstanding their neat
writing, may be almost as ignorant, in comparison, as horses.
And, I say it, he will hardly find (in this
enlightened day, and in the midst of this charitable people)
five in one hundred, who are able to correct the false grammar
of their language.—The cause of this almost universal ignorance
among us, I appeal to our school-masters to declare. Here is a
fact, which I this very minute take from the mouth of a young coloured man, who has been to school in this state
(Massachusetts) nearly nine years, and who knows grammar this
day, nearly as well as he did the day he first entered the
school-house, under a white master. This young man says:
"My master would never allow me to study grammar.
—I asked
him, why? "The school committee," said he,
"forbid the coloured children learning grammar—they would
not allow any but the white children to study
grammar."
It is a notorious fact, that the major part
of the white Americans, have, ever since we have been among
them, tried to keep us ignorant, and make us believe that God
made us and our children to be slaves to them and theirs. 0h!
my God, have mercy on Christian Americans!!!
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Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles,
Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World,
But in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United
States of America (ad. ed.: Boston: Published by David
Walker, 1830), pp.34-35. A copy of this
pamphlet is in the Library of Harvard University;
microcopy is in the Southern Historical Collection, the Library
of the University of North Carolina. See Clement Eaton,
Freedom
of Thought in the Old South, 121-26, and his "A
Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South," Journal of
Southern History, II (August, 1936), 1-12.
Walker's was one of the earliest of those
incendiary writings that caused fear of insurrection of the
slaves. Walker was a free Negro from North Carolina who went to
Boston where for a time he seemed to be a dealer in old clothes.
His pamphlet was said to have been widely circulated and read.
Eaton says that the "significance of the Walker pamphlet
has been overshadowed by the attention which has been given to
the more spectacular Nat Turner insurrection the following
year."
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Sources:
Chapter VI. "The Instruction of Negroes." In Edgar W.
Knight..
A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 1953
Chapter 10 "Up From Slavery: Educational and
other Rights of Negroes." In Edgar W. Knight and Clifton L. Hall. Readings
in American Educational History. New York Appleton-Century-Crofts,
Inc., 1951. Many states had laws prohibiting
the education of blacks; here black youngsters are turned away at the
school door |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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