ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a counternarrative to tradition historical narratives about literacy among people of African descent by expanding the definition of literacy beyond the reading and writing of text and by providing brief biographies of Black people who were literate. Drawing on primary source documents, I provide an overview of anti-Black racism and anti-literacy in federal and state laws that criminalized, denied, derailed, obfuscated, and restricted reading by interrogating why and how the ideology of White supremacy framed legislative decisions. As such, this history of reading access in the United States provides a critique of an ideological root of White supremacy and the false narrative that frames the democratic stance of the nation: the humanity, intelligence, and primacy of Whiteness and the unfiltered mischaracterizations about People of Color as less-than-human, unintelligent, and without culture, language, literacy, and value. Historical vignettes of Black people are interwoven to provide context and humanness. They also demonstrate that Black people possessed a critical consciousness about their treatment by White enslavers, the hypocrisy of the founding fathers, and the documents they wrote. Moreover, the vignettes describe how Black people made a way out of no way to learn to read, write, and express their beliefs, experiences, lives, and values through multiple forms of literacy.
