Those of us who write about our families inevitably engage in conversations with the dead. The two specters 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, of whom I have often written, 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 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, fewer than 1 in 10 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, nonliterate 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.
The connection between 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 advantages that accrued to the early literate classes would be clearly evident during the 20th century. In the 1940's, for example, the sociologist E. Horace Fitchett surveyed students at Howard University, then the seat of the black elite. Half of his respondents claimed to be descended from that small part of the black population that was free before Emancipation, which typically had greater access to education. Similarly, in 1963, the sociologist Horace Mann Bond wrote: "I have ... been astonished to discover how largely the 10 percent of Negroes who were free in 1860 have dominated the production of Negro professionals (and intellectuals) up to the present day." The black intellectual and professional classes have grown significantly since then. But studies of those groups today would probably show a strong relationship between early emancipation and membership in the present-day black elite.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01sun4.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
