ABSTRACT
The history of literacy is not easy to lay out in a clear and coherent manner, primarily because the murkiness around what constitutes “literacy”—and who has historically served as the arbiters around this—makes it a challenge. According to historians who’ve studied the number of signatures on colonial documents from the mid-1600s onward, a significant percentage of White men were considered to be “literate” during the late 17th/early 18th century—more so than those living in Europe at the time. Post–Civil War, literacy continued to be used both as a tool for liberation, as in the case of free Blacks demanding, developing, and subsidizing thousands of schools that made the literacy learning of students a priority (Butchart, 2020), and also as a tool for oppression—as when Whites who resented the 15th Amendment, which gave “citizens” of the United States the right to vote regardless of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” began instituting literacy tests at the polls.
