Kacey Cooper
Dr. Sumita Chakraborty
ENG 582
12 October 2022
Reading While Black: The Power of Black Literacy
Introduction
Setting sail in the 17th century, the journey of African American literacy begins with age-old histories of displaced Africans forced by European colonial powers across the Middle Passage to an unknown land by people interacting in an unknown language. Anti-literacy laws for people of color in America were enacted and became a tool for suppressing Black intellectual enlightenment, which often led to their civil disobedience and uprisings from bondage. Raciolingusitic scholars Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa perceive racial discrimination from English language-learning restrictions by European colonizers as a way to “other” indigenous races through White supremacist ideologies. Showing this, Europeans saw indigenous Africans as Rosa and Flores state, “positioned colonized populations as inferior to idealized European populations,” which led Black people in America to face discrimination and endure educational assimilation practices on their culture as punishment for their English literacy “incompetences” (7). Implementation of colonial United States anti-Black literacy regulation required African Americans to conduct unique ways of reading and writing through the interpretation, analysis, and creation of visual phonetic symbols, encoded speech patterns, and possibly visual textile imagery. The cultural significance of reading while Black has been shared across the disciplines of past and present Black communities to create traditions in Christina Sharpe’s theorized wake, “the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (13-14). Due to this “wake,” the power of reading while Black initially begins with the historical and theoretically analyzed perspectives of the ancient power of words noticed by institutions that enacted anti-literacy laws against people of color, leading to a literacy learning upheaval for the Black race.
Recognition of the power of reading dates back to ancient civilization when reading equated to the formation of cultural interactions leading anti-literacy enforcement of the Black race to become a tool of systemic oppression against minoritarian citizens. Massimo Maiocchi looks into the most studied grammatical formations of Asian cuneiform, North African Egyptian hieroglyphics, Central Asian Chinese script, and Mesoamerican Mayan hieroglyphics-all of which developed in different millenniums and centuries-as the most recognized cultural grammatical occurrences (397). This worldwide variety of literacy demonstrates to him that “Writing is the product of a complex society and therefore is bound to a variety of intertwined factors standing in multilevel, superimposed, and asymmetrical relationships with one another” (Maiocchi 398). The multiplicity of writing illustrates the need for early societies to have written communication, and as society advanced, the need for literacy naturally did as well. Maiocchi gives an example from ancient Mesopotamia of various-shaped clay tokens being used to account for life’s substances, such as textiles, foodstuffs, animals, and tools. These pieces were sometimes kept in bullae, a protective hollowed spherical clay envelope, with impressions that displayed token contents and ownership markings. However, they were not simply markings but impressions that required literacy for survival. Literature in ancient society began with this complex essential accounting mechanism for record-keeping, just as how the Mayans created their calendar for time-keeping. Maiocchi states, “...it took roughly seven hundred years for Mesopotamian scribes to conceive and create a document that was not either administrative or lexical in nature. Thus, the domain of writing remained restricted to city administration for a very long period of time” (408). Therefore, even literacy in ancient society was often left in the hands of powerful officials, rather than common citizens, to control the essentials in their communities.
African American literacy holds historical and cultural significance because the liberation of language equates to power, and its mastery is used by institutions to deny it to them. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida refers to these institutions by their Greek moniker arkheion, residences where official documents were filed to ensure their security. They were controlled by archons, the commanders of ancient society, enabling them to control the laws as they pleased. He writes that archives “inhabit this unusual place, this place of election where law and singularity intersect privilege” (Derrida 10). The same archons that control the archives also control literacy and have the privilege to delegate its access to benefit themselves. This is seen in anti-literacy Black codes where the government denied the enslaved rights to read due to retaliation that might arise from the fact that reading can serve as a lifeline and holds power that inspires interpretation and debate of previously accepted systems. Furthermore, Michel Foucault looks into the power dynamic between a subjugated people and the judiciary ruling class, like the ones who punished enslaved readers through anti-literacy laws, by stating,
...literature occupies a special place within that system: determined to seek out the quotidian beneath the quotidian itself, to cross boundaries, to ruthlessly or insidiously bring out secrets out in the open, to displace rules and codes, to compel the unmentionable to be told, it will thus tend to place itself outside the law, or at least to take on the burden of scandal, transgression, or revolt. (174)
In this quote, Foucault looks at literature as stories from the classical period, noting how the analysis of it can lead to the act of investigating its political and social power structure. He especially looks towards the fictitious nature of these stories, essentially questioning the authority of powerful structures on their authorities that can lead them to deny their rights in society.
Theoretical perspectives about the power of reading demonstrate that reading was developed for survival practices in early civilization. Because literacy plays an important role in the advancement of communities, ruling powers throughout history tend to gate-keep its accessibility, such as through anti-literacy operations against people of color in the United States. By building and viewing the subject of Black literacy from a theoretical perspective through history, scholars are better able to understand the depth of the Middle Passage’s voyage on the Black race and their communications. Therefore, knowing the importance of Black literacy is to know the power the Black race holds against systemic oppression through reading practices, understanding these terms in a southern rural setting where these laws were the harshest, understanding the gaps and erasures in its archival, and comparing anti-literacy against the Black race to anti-Black literacy practices continuing into 21st-century society. It shows that the power of reading while Black is about the survival and liberation of subjugated people through their notable comprehension of language in an anti-literacy administration.
The Fear of Black Literacy during Enslavement and Post-Reconstruction
Enslaved Black people began to read despite anti-literacy regulations as the archons attempted to enforce cultural assimilation within enslavement, proclaiming that the European race would save them from their “savagery.” In anti-slavery interpretations of literature, they were able to learn about the true nature of their enslavement based on White supremacist ideologies. As Capers analyzes, reading the Bible opened their eyes to the exodus of Israelites under a similar oppressive rule as enslavement in the United States. The Book of Exodus disagreed with the Story of Ham, the enslaver’s interpretation and reasoning for subjugating the Black race (Capers 12). The colonial government system feared that by noticing these discrepancies in biblical interpretations, and their enslaver’s rulings, the Black race would uprise and disrupt its slavery institution-the driving force behind the South’s economic and racial hierarchy. These power-holding sentiments remained the same as literacy tests were enforced on the majorly illiterate and previously enslaved population to disenfranchise them post-Reconstruction and the Klu Klux Klan’s destruction of Black schools, demonstrating the struggle for Black literacy because of the archon’s fear of Black educational enlightenment that threatened their social and economic standing.
Along with other historians, Birgit Rasmussen views the Stono Rebellion as one of the initial events that triggered the jumpstart of anti-literacy for the Black race. Serving as the largest rebellion in the colonies, in September 1739, approximately 20 native Africans led by Jeremy, a literate enslaved Black man, raided a store for weapons near Stono River. They killed two shopkeepers and marched towards Spanish Florida where the king of the colony granted the fugitives their freedom (Rasmussen 203). The current marker on the historical site states that they were “waving flags, beating drums, and shouting ‘Liberty!’” Perceiving Jeremy’s threat as an educated Black man, South Carolina updated its slave codes to include this anti-literacy law that Rasmussen shares:
Whereas, the having of Slaves taught to write or suffering them to be employed in writing may be attended with great Inconveniences Be it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever who shall hereafter teach or cause any Slave or Slaves to be taught to write or shall use or employ any Slave as a Scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever hereafter taught to write Every such Person and Persons shall for every such Offense forfeit the Sume of One hundred pounds, Current money. (202)
Anti-literacy laws for Black people grew harsher over time with laws often amending their physical and economic punishments for the rebels. For example, the updated 1829 Georgia law includes “any slave, negro, or free person” who are literacy educators or learners to be subject to a “fine and whipping, or fine or whipping at the discretion of the court…” It is believed by Rasmussen and other scholars that anti-slavery literature shared by the Spanish and northern abolitionists was distributed among the enslaved. She writes that this also gave enslavers the fear that literate enslaved people could forge documents of freedom and feign as free men (Rasmussen 202). If the forged passes looked and were written authentic enough, then it would permit the enslaved person to run away with more ease. Therefore, bounties for the runaway enslaved person would include if they were literate so that the public could keep an eye out on passes that seem forged and enslaved Black people who seemed educated and articulate
Moreover, literacy was banned for Black people as teaching people of color to read might “produce insurrection and rebellion to the manifest injury of the citizens of this state,” as shown in North Carolina’s 1830 law. The most notable example of this is during Turner’s revolution when his interpretation of the Bible and religion led him to believe that he was destined to lead an uprising against enslavers. Turner’s case is believed to have jumpstarted the strictest literacy strife between the enslaved and archonic powers as it proved through the reciprocated unfortunate murderous acts produced by enslavement that slavery was not natural and not approved of by the Black race. Turner was enslaved in Southampton County and was taught to read by his enslaver’s son. Coupled with his religiosity, his Black liberatory interpretations of literary signs in the bible and his visions made him favorable for being the preacher of the enslaved communities at the plantations he was enslaved at as he could interpret the Bible that he was often immersed in-the institution’s perceived dangers of Black literacy. Turner began having visions about God giving judgment to “earthly masters,” which gave him the name “The Prophet” and eventually led him to believe that God ordained him to rebel against his enslavers. Working in the fields for his new enslaver Thomas Moore, Turner states in his narrative that “the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first." As evident by his quote, Turner would not have made the parallels of his enslavement to the biblical devil-serpent characterization formulated in Genesis, Christ’s yoke from Matthew 11, and the parable statement of the last being the first unless he was empowered by the interpretation and analysis of reading. On February 12, 1831, Turner, who was now enslaved by Joseph Travis, interpreted a southeastern solar eclipse to be his signal from God to start his uprising. Turner and his followers, which historians note to be 76 men, brought firearms, knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments and communicated plans through their communities and neighboring plantations by using decoded songs. On August 21, 1831, Turner and his followers traveled plantations, freed the enslaved, and killed approximately 60 of the White people that they encountered. After Turner’s death and the trials of his followers, the uprising led the Virginia General Assembly to debate the future of slavery where the proslavery side prevailed and the assembly passed anti-literacy legislation for anyone of the Black race and restricted them from holding religious assembly without the presence of a White licensed minster. Many other southern states followed suit and enacted these harsh anti-literacy, anti-assembly, and anti-religious acts. As Rasmussen states, “Virginia’s slave codes became a model for anti-literacy legislation throughout the slave-holding south” (202). The referenced April 26, 1839 code states:
In Virginia, should free negroes or their children assemble at a school, to learn reading or writing, any justice of the peace may dismiss the school, with twenty stripes on the back of every pupil.
Post Reconstruction, the 13th Amendment brought the abolition of slavery, but it did not give liberty to Black anti-literacy tactics. The 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, however, after Reconstruction ended and federal troops withdrew from the South, this changed to be on the condition that they knew how to read and have the ability to pay a poll tax. For a race denied the right to literacy, this was an institutionalized force garnered against the Black vote, specifically poor southern Black men who would have been whipped for trying to learn to read during their critical, early language-learning years. Literacy tests were so challenging that only those well-versed in the standard English of that time would be able to pass them in order to participate in their civic right. If Black men could not pass the test, then they would not be allowed to vote.
Southern literacy tests became popular post-Reconstruction as test administrators proved to be archons of literacy and civic engagement as they could ask any difficulty level question and chose the number of questions that the subject needed to get correct to vote. Early literacy tests required a prospective Black voter to read a section of the state constitution and recite it to the county clerk, who often chose technical passages, to determine if the citizen was literate or not. Literacy tests ran through U.S. segregation until 1965 when President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act against them. A 1964 State of Louisiana literacy test depicts questions that ask the test taker who cannot prove a fifth-grade education to “1.) Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence. 2. Draw a line under the last word of this line. 3.) Cross out the longest word in this line.” The questions get undoubtedly more technical and riddle-like as it starts to include diagrams and letter sequences that ask the test taker to “10.) In the first circle below write the last letter of the first word beginning with ‘L’.” Similar to the early post-Reconstruction tests, a 1964 NAACP sample of an Alabama literacy test requires the participant to read excerpts from the Constitution where the board member marks and grades them on the missing words. The voter is also to write several words so that the board member could “make a judicial determination of his ability to write.” Early Black literacy tests served as a catch-22 for these prospective Black voters as the tests were designed for them to fail due to the historical anti-literacy efforts by the archons administering them. From the gatekeeper of the test’s scoring to the anti-literacy history of the voter, the near-impossible difficulty of the test proves the fear of Black civil involvement in the government, fear of seeing them as equals, and fear of them using their literacy (hence understanding legislation) to create inclusive social change.
Additionally, Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction built schools for Black education but lacked enough Black children to attend them due to racial segregation, limiting the opportunities underprivileged Black children had to conquer the anti-literacy system through formal education. Most of these students were also poor, and their parents did not have enough funds to afford to keep them in school. The Bureau faced problems of Whites not wanting to lease land for the schools. Most horrific is the length that the educational gatekeepers went to stop Black education from progressing in society, with Scribner writing, “...thousands of teachers white and black, Northern and Southern, male and female—were threatened, whipped, or killed for their work with African American students” (473). During U.S. Segregation, the war on Black literacy raged as schoolhouses were targetted with arson and vandalism criminal offenses that “speaks not merely to violence and discrimination but to the potent forms of political and historical obfuscation that accompanied it” (Scribner 471). The lack of support for Black education due to racism and the appalling physical consequences that surround it prove that White supremacists of the time would go through any means necessary to stop Black literacy through education because literacy gives power to children who will want to grow up and change the current status quo. Booker T. Washington states in his autobiography his experience meeting a formerly enslaved woman who recounts her well-being in enslavement but desires to support the education of Black children. Washington shares that she states,
I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into the eddication of dese boys an' gals."
This demonstrates a formerly enslaved person advocating for the education of
generations after a spiked fear from anti-Black enforcers seeking to undo part of the
colonial foundation that suppressed a race that they unjustly attempted to deceive into
believing that enslavement benefitted them-made possible by anti-literacy.
The fear of Black literacy began on the journey across the Middle Passage when the enslaved met people of a different skin color who spoke a different language. They realized that words carried great power in their institutions and enforced anti-literacy laws on the Black race so that they could continue to hold the power. In order to understand the depth of overcoming anti-Black literacy further, it’s important to look into the South’s conservative rural communities to understand their stories in overcoming often generational Black illiteracy efforts. An example of this occurred in the southern rural Wilson, NC community when Langston Hughes “the renowned Negro poet” visited there in 1949.
Reading in the Heart of “the Wake” - Hughes’s 1949 Trip to a Black Rural Community
Wilson, NC was one of Hughes’s stops during his “little trip down south” as he visited both western and rural eastern parts of the state during National Negro History Week on February 6th-12th in 1949. His trips were significant to the Black community there as he was selling his novel One Way Ticket and engaging in their efforts to advance their community during a racially segregated time. His presence there also sent a message to the people of Wilson, especially its children, that the success of a Black person can stem from their literacy and creativity.
On Sunday, February 6th, 1949, Hughes appeared at what he called the “small but cheerful little library” George Moses Library where he performed five relays of poetry readings to accommodate the unexpected 600 people in the 100-maximum capacity building. On February 7th, 1949, Hughes’s correspondence with Ms. Barabara Dreier at Black Mountain College led to him performing in exchange for lodging and transportation during his other Asheville events, showing that reading and writing can be used for something as important as a trade for comfort. On February 8th, 1949, Hughes performed at Allen High School; his first performance is where he met Nina Simone. This meeting became the start of a relationship that penned Hughes’s celebrated “Backlash Blues” with Simone. Tuesday, February 8th, 1949, Hughes performed to the Leather Workers Union members at Asheville’s Capital Press. Wednesday, February 9th, Hughes arrived in Selma at midnight and was driven by Wilson’s own Dr. Butterfield and Father Johnson to Wilson County where his performances would raise money for the Wilson County Negro Library’s bookmobile. His coming was organized by their librarian, Elizabeth Jenkins, who set up an honorary program for him throughout Wilson’s historic Black sector. On February 10th, Hughes performed at the all-Black St. Alphonsus School on Pender Street where the students recited “Freedom’s Plow” for him as part of their Negro History Week program. Hughes writes in his Chicago Defender column that “...the Negro nuns had an assembly of tiny youngsters who did all by themselves a fine Negro History program. It closed with a rendition of my ‘Freedom’s Plow’ by the apt little boys and girls who knew every line of it.”
Later that day, Hughes read and spoke about the racial “color line” and segregation for audiences at the Darden High School to a sold-out crowd. Tickets for this event started at .50 for children and went up to $1.50 for patrons, which all went to the library’s bookmobile fund. Next, Hughes attended a Negro History Week exhibit by librarian Elizabeth Jenkins at the storefront of Mount Hebron Lodge No. 42 that served as the Wilson County Negro Library. To end his visit in Wilson, Hughes attended a reception at Charles Darden’s house that night which he remarked in his same column to be a “lovely event.”
From Wilson, NC, Hughes traveled to Washington, DC and met with Arna Bontemps. Along with other renowned poets Bontemps, Sterling Brown, and Owen Dodson, Hughes performed at Howard University where he notes the chapel packed to the doors and attendees who sat on any available space. To conclude his tour, Hughes visited Boston, MA where he was the distinguished guest speaker at the Massachusetts Horticultural Club and visited a series of exhibits and events there coordinated by Anna Bobbitt Gardener. Hughes commemorated his tour by writing in his column:
...once in Dixie that good old southern hospitality takes over and makes a guest feel right at home. The cordiality and eagerness with which southern Communities, town or college, receive visiting guests are not surpassed in any other part of the county. And nowhere are the biscuits hotter, the chicken browner, the sweet potatoes sweeter, or the pies more flaky and delicious. Folks set a fine table ‘down home.
One of the reasons Hughes was received so warmly in the southern part of the state is because of his literary activism for the Black race in his poems. Most know him as the jazz poet formulating the type of poetry that celebrates Black urban life. However, as Dr. Jason Miller’s Critical Lives: Langston Hughes reminds us, to call Langston Hughes just a Harlem Renaissance poet disregards his importance during the Civil Rights Movement and his ability to lift the collective Black voice through literature.
Wilson, NC was a prime location for Hughes to share his literary and educational inspiration. Wilson, NC’s Black community formed different coalitions during this time, such as the Men’s Civic Club in 1939, to attend to “the problems and needs (civic, educational and recreational) of the Negroes of greater Wilson — city and county” as stated in their address. In his February 10, 1949 manuscript for his “Here to Yonder” Chicago Defender column, Hughes writes about the growing popularity of Negro History Week started by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. In his revised version, he writes, “For instance, this year the National Maritime Union is observing Negro History Week by a series of programs at its Negro York hiring halls. Ships at sea will have on their bulletin boards material relating to the glorious history of Negroes in America.” Hughes notes the historical significance of Black education by displaying how the struggle for Black freedom is a struggle for American freedom as he also writes that it comes “From Crispus Attucks who dies on Boston Common for American freedom way back in Colonial days to the last young Negro American aviator to fall on the European battle fronts in this year of our war, 1945, the record of the Negro in democratic struggle has been a most worthy one” (1).
Therefore, as shown in the archives for Hughes’s visit leading up to and during his visit to rural Wilson, NC, his journey there was a trip to highlight the importance of Black education and to pass it along through his literature to children so that they could be proud and continue to archive and make traditions of overcoming the Black racial struggle in an age where they were seeking integration and their schools were being targetted by White domestic terrorists.
While the archives tend to lean toward the popularity of Hughes in major urban cities, it’s important to note that Hughes often advocated for Black people lower on the socioeconomic ladder, who he calls in his book The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain “the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised!” While Hughes views these low-down folks from the “Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago,” his words are a testament to how he particularly cares for people not fairly represented in the archons of art, including literature. He is interested in places where Shakespeare faces a language crisis due to Black communities' use of African American vernacular (Ford 447). This, as Ford states, “asserts a vital connection between the fictional character and the people he represents.” (438).
Hughes was impressed with the students at St. Alphonsus as they recited his longest poem to date, Freedom’s Plow, back to him showing their dedication to literature as educated pupils. Freedom’s Plow is about the great American Dream that is deferred to African Americans through the African American oral traditions of a Negro spiritual by the same name to connect to the Black community (Dualé 3).
Witnesses of Hughes's 1949 attendance to St. Alphonsus Everlene Cunningham and Anne Harding were in the 3rd-4th grade when Hughes attended their Negro History Week program. This is shown as Hughes’s itinerary from that date states:
Visited: St. Alphonsus (Catholic) School… kindergarten to 4th).
Cunningham and Harding were not able to recall much about this event, but they remembered that every year their school brought in well-known Black artists to speak to them, demonstrating to them what educated and talented Black excellence can look like. However, Cunningham remembers some of what happened that day. The transcript below features parts of my interview surrounding Hughes's journey and the witnesses' experience with literacy at St. Alphonsus:
Kacey Cooper (K.C.):
Yeah, well in 1949 he [Hughes] visited Wilson during Negro History Week and we have some recollection about Saint Alphonsus being one of the churches, well schools back then, that he visited. I was wondering, and maybe we can start with Miss Harding: Can you recall the day of Langston Hughes's performance or anything else that you have recalled throughout your life of his performance at the school?
Annie Harding (A.H.):
Not really and be accurate. I remember that we were in the Catholic school, St. Alphonsus Catholic School. And in ‘49, Everlene? We were probably like third and fourth grade because we would have two classes in one room, and I think in ‘49 it had to be about third and fourth grade and you and I were probably in the third. Okay and we were lucky to, and fortunate to, get the people who came to visit our school. We had a number of I would just say cultural activities where the Nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence out of Baltimore who brought people such as Langston. I think, did Mariam Anderson come, Everlene?
Everlene Cunningham (E.C.):
I want to say maybe it was Dorothy Mayner.
A.H. :
Maybe, I’m not sure. Some other important singer came too and Stephen Fletchit, I remember that because I didn’t know what that was and what it meant. I thought it was going to be somebody doing something. But they also brought up the Raleigh or the State orchestra to perform for the children at the school. We had a room called The Big Room and we would all go into that big room, I’m thinking Everlene. The other thing too, I think he [Hughes] visited our class.
E.C. :
He did. That’s what I remember, I remember sitting in class. I knew who he was. At that time, they had already exposed us to his works of poetry and I knew who he was. They told us that he was a very important poet, a Negro Poet. And honestly, I can’t just remember. I wish I could remember specifics. I just remember sitting in class, he sat at the teacher's desk in front of us and, his looks, he looked just like the pictures that you see of him when he was, I guess, in early middle age, light brown skin, wavy hair and a mustache, and he talked to us but I don't remember what he said. He was rather soft-spoken and he just talked to us in a very friendly manner. But I don't remember what he said, I'm so sorry, I cannot recall what he talked about. I just don't know
A.H. :
The other thing too, Everlene, and I tell this all the time, Everlene and I use to go to the library every day at the school and Everlene said to me, let's read every book in the library. And I bet she may have finished her goal.
E.C. :
No, she did not.
A.H. :
But we were talking about the books that Ms. Jenkins had recommended for us.
E.C. :
We wanted to see our names in the books, Our names were in a lot of books because those days they had a little card that went in the book. You had to put your name on it for so if you didn't bring the book back, they would know who had it. But when you brought the book back, they put the card back into the little sleeve in the back of the book.
A.H. :
We also looked out-we made sure they put out book names-that they didn't take it away from us because we had it going for a while. My mom would pick me up in the afternoon, and they would put me across Pender Street right there, and I'd walked down and meet Everlene at the library in the afternoon. So, we were readers.
"Freedom's Plow" opens up by describing how an unnamed man starts out with nothing but eventually gains a community to build a world. “Freedom’s Plow” then segways into how colonial immigrants came to America to develop and execute the “American dream,” which carries various meanings as different positions (such as the slave men and slave masters) have differing ideas of what freedom actually is. However, Hughes reiterates that regardless of status, every American's goal was to gain freedom from oppressive forces, whether it be the British monarchy, enslavement, or both. Through the allegorical use of a plow tilling the land and yielding crops, Hughes contextually compares American togetherness with successful productivity and production during World War II. Furthermore, Hughes compares the renowned words of White American democracy founders, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, with words from African American freedom fighters, Frederick Douglass and the enslaved Gospel Plow singers. Near the end of his poem, he ties together his ballad of this “plow” through the gospel spiritual "Keep Your Hand on the Plow, Hold On" to show that everyone should be working towards the founding of American democratic ideals despite their racial differences. Hughes finishes his poem by placing all of these ideas of freedom together and declaring that America will not fall to oppressive, non-liberating values.
As a testament to Westover’s thoughts, the depiction of American history in Hughes's poems often led him to “adjust or question the narrative models he started out with in order to include the communities of Native and African Americans they ignore” (6). One of Hughes's intended audiences is privileged White Americans, possibly in government positions, because he is attempting to persuade them into integrating the races. As a Black poet who has written unfavorable, liberal ideologies about Black militancy and Communism support, he walked a thin line with his White American audience in his works. That’s why there are so many appeals to the White man in it, hence the lack of condemnation. However, Hughes does not forsake his African American audiences in this poem. The poem is structured around the culturally familiar "Keep Your Hand on the Plow, Hold On" spiritual. He includes African Americans as part of the founders of this country when he writes about how they helped shape America. Hughes also writes about how bad their struggles were in enslavement once he establishes the neutral and patriotic hook at the beginning of the story.
During the time of his performance in Wilson, NC, “Freedom’s Plow” became a sensation after Broadway performer Paul Muni read it on NBC radio on March 15, 1943, per the National Urban League's program. An organ and the Golden Gate Quartette played in the background to Muni's reading. In addition, stand-alone books of the poem were sold for $.10 at his readings and often signed by him. This poem’s performance was significant because it was used to garner hope in World War II, and specifically for the Black race, it was used to shed light on the Double V campaign for African Americans fighting in the global war who were treated as second class citizens both in the war and in the community after their service.
The Gospel Plow spiritual featured in the poem underwent several transformations to be used as the influential Civil Rights song from the 1950s-1960s as typical for traditional African American spirituals. It is “Through the call-and-response structure of this passage, Hughes gives voice to aspiring but oppressed citizens” (Westover 6). It is also through call-and-response that oral traditions are changed and revived. By 1942, the Gospel Plow’s lyrics were changed to the song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” in the fight against fascism in 1942. Therefore, as the Gospel Plow’s lyrics state “Keep your hand on the plow, hold on/Hold on, hold on/ Keep your hand on the plow, hold on” the “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” rendition commonly looks like “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on/Hold on, hold on/Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.” Since its Negro spiritual days, the song has also been sung by White and Black singers alike with Bob Dylan’s cover of it, Dorothy Cotton’s cover of “Eyes on the Prize,” and Peete Seeger’s next rendition of the song to “Keep Your Hand on that Gun, Hold On” in his group Union Boys against fascism during WWII.
Therefore, Hughes's “Freedom’s Plow” keeps the oral Negro spiritual tradition alive after so many renditions. By placing lines from the spiritual in the same exclamatory and capitalized format as words from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln who many consider being the founding fathers of American democracy-even though Hughes notes that democracy excluded the Black population-and also Frederick Douglass, who is similarly considered to be the Black founder of intellectual freedom, Hughes pays homage to literature not normally thought to be as powerful as words from these famous figures. He dips into the margins of the archive and shows that the power of Black literacy also includes the interpretation of words through the spoken manner just as much as the written one. Ultimately, Hughes proves through his trip to Wilson, NC that Black literacy is important to the advancement of the Black race through the remembrance of its history.
Hughes’s connection of literature with music tells the tale of poetry with Jones stating, “Hughes practiced his craft within several categories of jazz poetry, including: live readings of his poetry unaccompanied, live performances of his poetry with blues and/or jazz accompaniment, and recordings of his poetry with and without music” (1154). His musical inclinations also show the foundations of Black literacy in communication across displacement, community, and time through the ballad of an old Negro Spiritual. While Black performance should be appreciated and revered as any other, it’s also an age-old theme of seeing the Black race as sole entertainers without regard to the historical and cultural meanings of expression against the archons of society that are expressed in their art. This dates back to when Black people were forced to perform for White audiences in their enslavement such as Saartjie Baartman, also known as the Hottentot Venus, as an enslaved Black woman exhibited in tight-fitting clothes in real life and nude in photographs with portrayals of enlargements of her body as a freak show by her enslavers. Therefore, it’s important to rectify literature meanings in Black literacy and overall communication so that its oral traditions do not get lost as just mere forms of art rather than literature that needs to be closely analyzed for historical and cultural meanings.
Jones points out that for Hughes, the art of music and lyric should work together to form each other and not be separate entities from the art of literature. Hughes states, “The music should not only be a background to the poetry, but should comment on it… I listen to what they say in their playing, and that affects my own rhythms when I read. We listen to each other” (Jones 1160). The same goes for African American spirituals which are at times considered to be at the heart of an enslaved person’s experience. Songs and their universally understood messages within the Black race have been used to communicate themes of escapism to life-saving information. Most importantly, in the wake of enslavement, these spirituals now communicate an oral history from so long ago to a racially integrated generation that feels the aftereffects of enslavement in Sharpe’s wake. It can be shown in the U.S.’s 2017 Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem titled “Wade in the Water” after the Negro spiritual that’s about God purifying one in a religious experience, but also about finding freedom through the turbulent waters of enslavement. After personally meeting the Geechee Cullah Sisters, descendants of the enslaved, Smith asks God in her poem, “Is this love the trouble you promised?” Proving that reading into these spirituals while Black produces questions about Black advancement and comparison to their own society, opening doorways of Black thought from the act of reading.
Archival Gaps in Black Literacy History
U.S. enslavement was made to be a Panopticon system; a Foucault exploration of a prison system’s power where a central tower placed in its center could overlook the circle of prison cells without inmates knowing that they were being watched. His theory states that this would heighten inmates' consciousness and lead them to subject themselves to the system’s authority in fear that their actions would be seen at any time. Anti-Black literacy laws enacted on the Black race coupled with physical punishments were used to deter them from reading. Brown highlights how Negro spirituals' use of these decoded biblical messages was a literary revolution due to the enslaved not being able to read and not being able to hold religious assemblies without a White minister present (14). Through this idea, Brown demonstrates that literacy for the enslaved also includes the spoken word and the universal teachings of a race to itself from the biblical interpretation-an act of reading-that can only be done through the analysis of the text. It serves as an impressive reminder that a race who could not read learned through various other ways through the spoken word to gain this act of literacy. It is also in this interpretation that the archon’s fears became true. Brown states that these songs were said to be sung on the Underground Railroad in "praise houses" and during outdoor meetings called "brush arbor meetings," "bush meetings," or "camp meetings" in the eighteenth century to communicate to other enslaved people on how to find freedom and what to do (17). Enslavement found a way around this panopticon of enslavement through its use of literary interpretation of symbols in Negro spirituals, and the theoretical approaches of their archival demonstrate the oral tradition’s success in atoning enslavement through its literature.
Looking at the gaps in the archive includes finding marginalized research of people and facts forgotten or misrepresented in their archival. As Derrida points out, there is a desire to both preserve and destroy archives because of the scholarly obsession to control information (14). This is the case in many Black archives concerning enslavement as the displaced people often have their history watered down by personal biases of the institution that archives them. Libraries and museums currently take reparative measures to correct harmful stereotypes. Scholars such as Robin Coste Lewis personally work with these archives by taking titles from museum art depicting enslaved Black people in undesirable tropes and using them to form poetry to remind the public that the Black race is not the pain of their racial trauma but rather humans who have and currently are living life to overcome it. In her novel Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, she writes:
At Auction Negro Man in Loincloth serves liquor to Men bidding
on The Slaves while A Slave Woman
attends Two Women Observing The Scale.
African Slave Encased in an Iron Mask
and Collar Slave Children starting out
to harvest coffee on an oxcart.
Negroes under a date palm.
Negro Woman seated at a table, facing
left, writing
with a quill. (77)
In this poem, Lewis details the enforcement of Black participation in oppression through the Black man serving liquor to the enslavers at an auction. She then details daily living for the enslaved as evidenced by the collared enslaved children going to harvest coffee. The end juxtaposes this restricting nature of enslavement by illustrating a Black woman writing, indicating the liberties of literacy when faced with historical bondage.
Negro spirituals, religious hymnals with decoded meanings of African American liberation, are one of the most transformative archived forms of Black history due to their oral traditions in keeping history and literature alive. Brown writes that the enslaved kept their enslavers content by not explicitly engaging in rebellious acts, but through decoded meanings within these spirituals. They often compared themselves to biblical figures in bondage, such as the Israelites’ Exodus. To Brown, this was not the White God that imposed pro-slavery rhetoric on them but their God who instead of using the Book of Ham to enforce enslavement, used the story of the Israelites escaping the pharaoh to encourage liberty. These songs often include what the biblical figure did to hold themselves together in bondage and fight back. Brown states that “...in reality they were ‘stretching out’ on God's Word, affirming a new-found experience that could not be destroyed by the masters” (9). These spirituals were often sung in the fields for the enslaved to pass time under laborious toil. However, they were also sung in groups with chanting and dancing. Earlier forms of spirituals occurred during “ring shouts” where the enslaved would shuffle in a circular dance and clap their hands to these biblical-inspired songs. As a displaced race, enslaved Black people used biblical parallels to codify their own struggle and explore the new religion that they were forced in, ultimately finding new hope and community within it. Spirituals were often call and response, where a leader would improvise a line of the spiritual and the chorus, singing a solid frame in unison. Relating to tone, there are “sorrow songs” and “jubilees” which embody their name. These spirituals and their literature carried power as they helped the enslaved form a Black community, provide therapy for their trauma, and serve as decoded communication, and ultimately literature, for the fugitive.
While it is hard to pinpoint exact lines in spirituals that interpret to one escaping enslavement, “Go Down Moses” is a notable spiritual whose anti-slavery biblical allusions helped runaways achieve and live up to the rebellious achievements of Black literacy through diverse forms of it. It is said by Harriet Tubman, who is referred to as Moses because of his abolition of the Israelites, to be a song she sang to nearby enslaved people to inform them that she was taking them to freedom. The lyrics to the song read as follows:
When Israel was in Egypt's land,
Let my people go,
oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land,
tell old Pharaoh: Let my people go.
The Lord told Moses what to do,
Let my people go,
to lead the Hebrew children through,
Let my people go.
Looking at the spiritual through a literary lens, it contains biblical allusions to the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt across the Red Sea. It acknowledges the biblical’s story of Pharoah’s fear that the Israelites in Egypt would take over, so they “could not stand” which means that they could not thrive or physically stand up due to their back-breaking labor of building cities for the pharaoh. The suggestion that Moses needs to “go down” correlates with the idea that abolitionists from the North need to come down and help liberate the enslaved in the South. The Israelites in “Egypt’s land” can interpret as the displacement of the Black race from Africa. God telling Moses to tell the “old” Pharoah indicates that enslavement is an outdated tradition that has been conquered by the Israelites and therefore can be conquered by the enslaved Black race. God referring to the Israelites in the Bible and spiritual as “my people” also indicates a Black person’s interpretation of the Bible of the belief that racism and slavery are not of God.
Spirituals also give a glimpse into the enslaved life due to these poetries being passed throughout history. However, Brown reminds his readers that not every literary reference is a reference to escaping the underground or crossing the river: “Every reference to crossing the Jordan does not mean escape to the North; every Israelite battle does not mean slaves' struggle for freedom…The body of spirituals must be seen as a communication system created and utilized by the slaves who used them” (Brown 22). Therefore, spirituals can also just serve as a communication tool to escape and emotionally overcome racial bondage. This is especially true throughout history when spirituals are sung as protest songs in the wake of enslavement. Gospel Plow’s transformation to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” during the Civil Rights era to “We Shall Overcome” was sung in the streets during the Civil Rights Movement. Baraka states that “We even want to use our poetry and song as yet another means to effect the destruction of this national oppression and its material base, monopoly capitalism” (10). Baraka shows that from spirituals to protest songs, no matter their origins and originalities or what they were used for, the themes of the spirituals are used by the past and modern Black societies to fit them into their own struggle for overcoming oppression in the wake. The power of reading in this case is the transcendence of Black cultural archives in oral traditions through poetry.
In addition, some Black literacy and communication practices have an uncertain past as they do not have the support or are proven with evidence, besides through oral traditions. One of the most contested forms of Black communication is Freedom Quilts used on the Underground Railroad to inform runaway slaves about the obstacles they may face on their path to freedom. Stories go that the enslaved would hang out quilted patterns, such as crossroads symbols to alert their fellow enslaved people that trouble was up ahead in case they were planning to escape. Other symbols might include a myriad of interconnected squares to inform the enslaved that a safe house with abolitionists is at their destination. The drunkard’s path may inform the enslaved that bounty hunters are nearby and it is in their best interest to go back. Most famously known is the North Star which the enslaved would look and travel towards to direct themselves to northern states or even Canada. In addition, viral posts have circulated about how enslaved Black people would braid their hair into maps for escaping on the Underground Railroad. Posts show that they also braided rice seeds within the plaits so that when they settled they could grow the crop for their own nourishment. Again, this has not been verified or talked widely about by the scholarly community, indicating scholarly gaps regarding Black literature and history.
Considering how these erasures and unknowns exist in the archive, what do we do with this information? How do we approach these questionable, yet beloved stories of Black literacy considering its historical undervaluing by the archons? These passed-down stories make for good interpretations of the lengths that enslaved Black people went to escape their bondage. The gaps and the margins of Black literary history formed by Freedom Quilts illustrate that even in their contestation, they are proof of how the legacy of slavery produces the desire to continue oral traditions because the power of reading these quilts and hair patterns relates to the power of cultural identity through decoding literature. While these signs are contested so much, one thing is for certain, the enslaved read astrological signs to find freedom from their enslavement. The tale of enslaved Black people running away towards the North Star by following the drinking gourd remains untested. The spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd” refers to the Big Dipper star formation, which gave directions to escaping enslaved people. The song states, “Well the river bank makes a mighty good road/Dead trees will show you the way/Left foot, peg foot, travelin' on/Follow the drinkin' gourd.” Its cup points to the North Star which the enslaved could follow to northern states or to Canada to freedom. The guord refers to a hollowed-out tool that rural southerners used as a water dipper.
Interpretation of this song required the enslaved to have a literacy background in analyzing spoken poetry, so even though they were not reading words off of a paper, they still had the ability to interpret and to read signs, disobeying the system against them so that they could have the benefits of the power of reading while Black. Therefore, Black reading practices during enslavement were not just comprehending technical symbols, but the challenging task of reading and interpreting unwritten, widespread cultural signs shared amongst themselves.
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