| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. By Heather Andrea Williams. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 304 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2920-X.)

Three decades of groundbreaking scholarship on African American life in slavery and its immediate aftermath has confirmed W. E. B. Du Bois's contention that African Americans long harbored an unquenchable thirst for literacy and wielded formal education as a weapon of self-emancipation. More recent scholarship has emphasized particularly the degree of agency exercised by the black community itself in achieving access to knowledge. Heather Andrea Williams's new study, Self-Taught, joins that body of scholarship pressing the case that African Americans were not passive recipients of education, but rather the active agents of realizing the promise of formally schooled intelligence.

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