ABSTRACT
In order to contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding the literate practices of African people in the context of the United States, I draw from scholarship examining Black readers, writers, speakers, and activists of the early 1800s. Any viable framework must be viewed tentatively because new discoveries are still being made. Therefore, scholars interested in such work cannot “theorize in a totalizing fashion” (Peterson, 1995, p. 4). Enslaved and freed Blacks participated in the teaching and learning of literacy unbeknownst to slave owners who opposed education for Blacks in general. Literacy efforts included secret schools, and literary societies that emerged during Reconstruction as well as speakers and writers who used oral and written texts to confront racial oppression. Recovery work has demonstrated how these institutions created literate traditions “to supplement and sustain their literary education” (McHenry, 2002, p. 10). Additionally, research examining lives of Blacks in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals the intersection between reading, writing, speaking, and action. To be sure, in a study of “‘Doers” of the word, Peterson (1995) posits that for African American women speakers and writers “speaking and writing constituted a form of doing, of social action, continuous with their social, political, and cultural work” (p. 3). Peterson’s analysis of women speakers and writers could also be used while examining male writers, and speakers such as Frederick Douglass and David Walker. In sum, early
literacy practices were not solely carried out for the purpose of leisure and enjoyment but they were political acts that could be considered early forms of institution-building. Literacy always served a greater purpose and it was that purpose that drove the craftsmanship of language and activism.
