| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Heather Andrea Williams. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 304. $29.95.
The central question guiding Heather Andrea Williams's finely crafted study is "What did ordinary African Americans in the South do to provide education for themselves during slavery and when slavery ended?" (p. 1). In nine deeply researched and passionately written chapters, the author provides nuanced analyses of why and how enslaved and emancipated blacks, who believed "knowledge is power," became literate, often in the face of racial hostilities. Admittedly this "was by no means an untold story" (p. 3) when Williams began the dissertation from which her book emerged, but her "telling" has fresh dimensions.	1
Unlike previous studies exploring the ways southern blacks gained literacy at the behest of northern white missionaries and the Freedmen's Bureau in the Civil War-Reconstruction era, upon which Williams correctly builds, this book shifts the focus, using James C. Scott's "hidden transcripts" argument to highlight the creative determination of blacks to abandon the metaphorical chains of ignorance. Also of great importance over time were the efforts of black Americans to influence or control the development of and access to education for their people. They associated literacy with liberation: physical, mental, and political.	. . .

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