Black Catholic Featured Article ~ { Print Version }
The National Black Catholic Congress
www.nbccongress.org

Reading as a Subversive Act: Libraries as the Guide to Liberation
By Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
Copyright, Catholic Library Association; Catholic Library World 78:4 (June 2008), 302-305. Reprinted with permission.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in the year 1818 (+1895). He wrote three accounts of his life. In each one he described how he learned to read and write. As a boy about the age of eleven, he was sent from one slave-holder on an extensive plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland to another slave holder and his wife in Baltimore. In the beginning, the wife of the slave owner treated him very well. As he described it, Sophia Auld even went so far as to begin teaching him how to read. He wrote, "Mrs. Auld…very kindly commenced to teach me the A,B,C." He then went on to say, "After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters." Everything changed, however, when Mr. Auld discovered this. He "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." He went on to say…

If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master - to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world…if you teach that nigger… how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.¹

Even though Douglass was yet a boy, from that episode he realized that to read was the key to freedom. The attitude of Mrs. Auld eventually changed towards him. She did her best to stop him from looking at the newspaper. As Douglass wrote, she soon learned that "education and slavery were incompatible with each other.² By this time he was twelve, and he made friends with the young white boys who played with him on the street. Douglass persuaded them, as he said, to become his teachers. He would carry a book with him when he had to go on errands. He would find a little more time on return journeys when he could read. He learned to write in the same way. He copied the numbers marked on a piece of lumber by the ship carpenters at the shipbuilding yard where he was sent out by his master. He copied the numbers and then the abbreviations on the lumber. Slowly he learned to write. Douglass would later become the best known African American of his time, both in America and in Europe. Orator, lecturer, statesman, uncrowned leader of the black population, founder of the first black newspaper, abolitionist, friend of Lincoln - it began with a young slave boy learning to read.

Hal Hutson was born a slave in Galveston, Tennessee, in 1847. He was ninety years old, and living in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he was interviewed by field workers who were part of the WPA researchers in the 1930s. As part of the Federal Writers Projects during the Depression, the federal government began a project of recording the oral histories of former slaves. Mr. Hutson described life on a plantation of some forty slaves. When he was fourteen years old, he took the master's children to school. He sat outside as the white children went to school. He wrote:

When one reads the narrative accounts of slaves in these interviews, one frequently hears that one learned how to read because white children taught them. Marshall Mack grew up a slave in Bedford County in Virginia. He explained that his Uncle John was a carpenter who used to take the children of the mistress to school in a "two-horse surrey." He wrote that "on such trips, the chillun learned my uncle to read and write." He added that they could have had trouble "for it was a law among slave-holders that a slave not be caught wid a book."⁴ The penalty was a terrible whipping. Most of the accounts reveal the ever-constant experience of the terrible whipping meted out to slaves, male and female. Doc Daniel Dowdy was born in Georgia in 1856. He learned very young that the white man, no matter how young, was to be called master. He wrote: "the first time you was caught trying to read or write, you was whipped with a cow-hide, the next time with a cat-o-nine tails, and the third time they cut the first jint (sic) offen your forefinger." At the same time you received thirty-nine lashes. Daniel Dowdy went on to point out two slave preachers who were found by the patrollers; and, although they had a pass, they found two letters addressed to them. Taken to the slave-holders, he was asked whether he knew that the two slaves, who were brothers, knew how to read and write. Called by the owner, one was afraid and denied being able to read and write. The other said "yes sir." And then pointed out that his brother was even better able to read and write than he. The owner - "because of their spunk" - told the patrollers to leave them alone.⁵

Slavery in the United States was especially brutal and demeaning. A slave had no rights. He or she was totally under the power of the slave owner. As a result, slave society was a violent society. Slavery demanded coercion and total control. There was the constant fear of revolt or escape. With the division between slave states and free states, war was seemingly inevitable. The slave population was an ever-increasing threat. It was imperative that this slave population be maintained in ignorance and under control. All books and periodicals were to be censored. Any information regarding ideas and information touching on slavery or freedom, any changing attitudes and political discussion both in the States and in Europe was carefully kept from slaves. As a result any notion of freedom or emancipation was to be absolutely concealed. Every effort was made to control and obliterate any communication or literary source outside of the South. In the antebellum South, reading was made an act of subversion; learning was an act of revolt. Sooner or later all of the southern states made teaching a slave a penal offense, subject to prison. For the slave who learned to read or write, amputation of fingers and whipping with cow hide lashes was the standard penalty. Excessive whipping could be fatal. Inasmuch as learning to read was almost always clandestine and hidden, historians lack any certain idea as to the number of slaves who were taught by others or who learned on their own in the period before the Civil War. In her recent study, When I can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South, Janet Duitsman Cornelius surmises that perhaps ten percent of the slaves had become literate before the Civil War. ⁶

Not all slave owners, however, opposed education for their slaves. George Moses Horton (1797?-1883?) was a slave in North Carolina. His owner had no objection to allowing him to learn to read and write. He was a poet and can be considered the first professional black poet in this country. Much of his poetry was published. He hoped to acquire enough money to buy his freedom. He was finally freed by Union soldiers.

Black Catholics were to be found both in the South and in the North. Slaves and free, many black Catholics also sought learning. In reading the accounts of many blacks who learned to read secretly, the major desire was to learn to read in order to read the Bible. For black Catholics there were also efforts to be taught the catechism. There is an example of black Catholics in Philadelphia who petitioned the "Board of Trustees of St. Mary's Church Philadelphia, held November 15, 1817, that the children might learn the catechism."

The black Catholic petitioners acknowledged that they did not have the money "to acquire the knowledge of our religion and the duties whereby they might be to repel the incessant attacks." The petitioners go on to say that those who wish to proselytize their children "can quote the Scriptures with every phrase in order to seduce the ignorant." They remark that some of their children have been seduced from our religion. They are asking for the same help to be given them as given to the white Catholics in need of aid. Six men signed the petition. The board decided to postpone any decision until later.

It is not known whether it was answered later.⁸

The importance of books for Black Catholics can be seen in the activity of the Society of the Holy Family, a black Catholic Mutual Benefit Society in 1843 in Baltimore. This society met weekly in the basement of the cathedral parish. The two hundred black men and women met together to listen to a conference by the assistant priest, sing some hymns, recite the rosary, and have Masses said for the deceased. The society, it seems, had free people and slaves. The members decided to establish a lending library and to purchase a book case. In the beginning one would borrow a book for one cent for a month and then one cent for each week thereafter. Later the cost went up to two cents. The library had catechisms, lives of the saints, devotional books, and Catholic hymns.⁹

Black religious congregations of women were founded before the Civil War. In 1829, a community of black women began in Baltimore known as the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The founder was Mary Elizabeth Lange (c1784-1882) who came to this country about 1827. With the help of Jacques Joubert, S.S., and three other women of color they began a school in 1827, one of the first black Catholic schools in the United States.

Henriette Delille (1812-1862), born in New Orleans, a free woman of color, descendant of slaves, began her ministry for the poor, the destitute, the catechism for the slaves and the free, along with two other women of color. They taught and they nurtured slaves and free. They especially worked for the baptism of slave infants and they encouraged the Sacrament of Marriage for adult slaves. They became known as the Sisters of the Holy Family. By the 1840s they had evolved into a religious community of sisters. Both the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family brought reading and writing to the black community in an urban background. They were black women of faith in Baltimore and New Orleans who lit the light of learning in the black Catholic community before the Civil War.

Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, there was a tremendous movement by the freed slaves to learn how to read and to write. Janet Cornelius wrote: "…freed slaves enthusiastically grasped opportunities to learn to read and to write openly and legally." She quoted Booker T. Washington's remark, "It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn." He said in another place that men and women in their seventies wanted to learn to read the Bible before they died. Others remarked that the freed slaves joined together in groups to read to each other.¹⁰

We who are teachers, scholars, researchers, and librarians, are faced with the fact that reading a book is not a very important activity on the part of young people today. The computer is seen as more accessible. In fact, the computer with its manifold options is another kind of media than the book or the page. The interaction of YouTube on the computer screen operated by the keyboard seated before it, is a totally different experience than the printed page or the written parchment speaking from the page, held in the hand. And yet, no doubt we will also learn how to do our lectio divina online….

Permit me, however, to suggest that the next time a kid comes in from the projects and complains that none of these books in your library are about black people, explain that two hundred years ago more or less black people in this country learned the meaning of freedom by carefully examining letters in a book and thereby learned the meaning of the words. And they did all this risking life and limb. Or explain that two thousand years ago there was this very important black man riding in a chariot on the Gaza road from Jerusalem to Nubia. Although a slave and an eunuch he was a rich man - with his personal chariot - and his own manuscript scroll. He was the treasurer of the Kandake, the queen mother, in Nubia, south of Egypt. He was reading like all ancient peoples by forming the words with his mouth…he was reading in Greek. We don't know his name but we know that Philip heard him read, and he explained to him the passage of Isaiah about the Messiah. Tell them to read about it in Acts, Chapter 8. The queen-mother's treasurer - a powerful rich black man - read words and received baptism. And this time reading became the key to salvation.

1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. An American Slave. Written by Himself. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988.) 58.
2. Ibid., 64.
3. "Hal Hutson," in The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Ed. T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 205-207.
4. Ibid., "Marshall Mack," 276-78.
5. Ibid., "Doc Daniel Dowdy," 128-32.
6. Cornelius in her book, When I Can Read my Title Clear. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991) 9, agrees with the noted African American historian, Carter G. Woodson, Education of the Negro (Washington, D.C., 1921) 228.
7. George Moses Horton. Early Black American Poets. Ed. William H. Robinson. 22-23.
8. "Petition of the Catholic People of Color in Philadelphia, 1817." In "Stamped with the Image of God" African Americans as God's Image in Black. Eds. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. and Jamie Phelps, O.P. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003.) 20.
9. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., History of Black Catholics in the United States. (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 86-87. Also Davis and Phelps, "Stamped with the Image." 22-24.
10. Janet Cornelius, "When I Can Read…" 142-43. Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865. New York: Norton, 1978) 138.