Learning to Read

At the poem’s start, Chloe informs the reader of northern and abolitionist allies’ efforts to build educational opportunities for newly freed Black citizens in the South. While the US government sanctioned these programs, many white southerners and Confederates resented Black people and their allies’ goals of educational equality.

Prior to the Civil War, pro-slavery states undermined any attempts by Black individuals to learn. Virginia and North Carolina barred any gatherings to teach free and enslaved Black people to read and write. Other states, such as Alabama, placed steep legal fines on anyone caught teaching a Black person. The pro-slavery states feared rising literacy rates among Black people as it would “make us all too wise” and destabilize the institution of slavery (Line 8).

Like with slavery, it was only after the war that anti-literacy laws changed. Figures like Uncle Caldwell and Ben strove to learn the written word during their enslavement despite the act being illegal.

When Watkins Harper places the men’s success next to the legal post-war efforts to educate freed Black people, she implicitly frames the law as fickle and amoral. While it now allows “the Northern folks” to send “Yankee teachers down,” it once condemned it (Lines 1-4). Watkins Harpers asks her readers to see the law as a flawed neutral force.