Going Against the Grain 3

The last ten pages of this reading feature how opportunities for African Americans to gain literacy were available to both pre-Civil War era and post-Civil War era. African Americans helped themselves to literacy in provocative and creative ways, but after the Civil War they were energized to take supreme advantage of what had previously had been denied them. This energy was cycled in three ways: the Sabbath school movement; the missionary school movement; and the common or public school movement (153).

The Sabbath school movement was church-sponsored and community-run schools that provided basic literary instruction. It was run predominately by African Americans themselves and operated in the evenings and on weekends. The african American community itself was largely responsible for laying the fertile foundation for universal literacy in African American communities. The second effort toward literacy was the missionary school movement. During the Civil War, various northern community and church organizations intensified their "home" mission activities...These efforts became a primary mechanism for the advocacy of freedom, justice, and empowerment (153). The third effort, the common/public school movement, emerged in the early 1870s. Southern leaders rose to regain their authority by supporting the education of African Americans through the establishing of public schools. These southern leaders were aided by many industrial philanthropists, who sought to maintain the status qui and push industrial models of education and to discourage liberal arts education (155).

This section of the reading went on to tell how African Americans began starting schools of their own such as Spelman College and Morehouse College. Schools such as these came to because African American parents with the resources to take advantage of other options typically did not favor public schools. They did not want to subject their children to the abuse of white southerners or to a southern-designed system of "Black" education, which they knew to be inferior. They preferred private schools that were still being run by philanthropic support, with a significant percentage of that support coming from the freed men and women themselves (155). Such efforts were repeated across as a network of private schools was established that would ultimately form the core of what today is the collective of historically African American private colleges and universities. This network of public and private institutions continues today, at the beginning of the 21st century, having forged a remarkable historical record for education of African American people (156).