Resumo de Why Slave-era Barriers To Literacy Still Matter

Why slave-era barriers to literacy still matter
The connection between the century and Present-'Day success is a touchy subject
Those of us who write about our families inevitably engage in conversations with the dead. The two spectres who take up most of my time these days were black, slave-era founders of the Staples family line. My great grandfather John Wesley Staples was conceived in the waning days of the Civil War, narrowly missed being born a slave, and died just 11 years before my birth' His mother, Somerville Staples' was enslaved in the home of a prominent Virginia doctor when she became pregnant with .John Wesley' her last child and the first freeborn member of the Staples clan.
My great-grandfather and his mother were barely visible against the backdrop of the l9th-century south when I first started to focus on them about 15 years ago. Since then, the outlines of their lives have become steadily clearer, thanks to remembrances from elderly relatives and documents that have recently turned up in the public record. It will take years perhaps even decades, to flesh 'them out fully. But it is already clear that their 2lst-century descendants stand heavily in their debt and that my career as a writer would have been much less likely - and perhaps even impossible - without them.
My older uncles, some of whom practically grew up in John Wesley's house, regaled me with tales of his wealth and his taste for fancy cars - and the fierceness with which he responded to white Southerners who crossed him. But the most crucial fact about my great-grandfather, it seems to me, was that he could read write and calculate fairly well - even though he was born in 1865, when, thanks to the policies of enslavement, less than one in l0 black Southerners could read. Literate black people were not immune to the mob violence and intensifying racism that greeted all African-Americans after the Civil War' Nevertheless, the ability to read and write gave them a vantage point on their circumstances and protected them from swindlers who regularly stripped illiterate people of land and other assets' For these families, literacy was a form of social capital that could be passed from one generation to the next. By contrast, non-literate families were disproportionately vulnerable to the Jim Crow policies? and social exploitation that often locked them out of the American mainstream for generations on end.
Literate black were not immune to the mob violence and intensifying racism that greeted all African-americans after the civil war. Neverthless the ability to read and write gave them a vantage point on their circumstances and protected them from swindlers who regularly stripped illiterate people of the land and other assets. For these families literacy was a form of social capital that could be passed from one generation to the other. By contrast non literate families were disproportionately vulnerable to Jim Crow policies and social exploitation that often locked them out of the American main stream for generations to end.
The connection between the black literacy in the 19th century and present-day professional success is a touchy subject as is the entire issue of class distinctions among black Americans. Even so the advantage that accrued to the early literate classes would be clearly evident during the 20th century.
In the-l940s' for example the sociologist E Horace Fitchet surveyed students at Hayward university then the seat of the black elite .half of his respondents claimed to be descended from that small part of the black population tat was free before emancipation which typically had greater access to education . Similarly' in 1963 the sociologist Horace Mann Bond wrote that he has been astonished to discover how largely the 10 percent of negroes who were free in 1860 have dominated the production of Negro processionals and intellectuals up to the present day . The black intellectual and professional classes have grown siy since then. But the studies of those today would probably show a strong relationship between early emancipation and membership in the Present-black elite

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