The Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs and her Work to Teach Slaves and Former Slaves to Read

One of the earliest accounts of teaching an adult to read comes from the work of the slave Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897). Even though it was unlawful to teach slaves to read, Jacob’s owner’s daughter taught her to read and write. In 1861, after she became a free woman, Jacobs wrote a book entitled, “Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself ” (Jacobs, 1987/1861). In it she tells the story of how she helped an older black man, a slave like her, learn to read. She said, “ He thought he could plan to come three times a week without its being suspected. I selected a quiet nook, where no intruder was likely to penetrate, and there I taught him his A, B, C. Considering his age, his progress was astonishing. As soon as he could spell in two syllables he wanted to spell out words in the Bible. … At the end of six months he had read through the New Testament, and could find any text in it.” Later in her life, after achieving her freedom, Jacobs taught school for former slaves in what were called the Freedmen’s Schools. These schools were set up after the Civil War when the U. S. Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands as the primary agency for reconstruction (Morris, 1981). In th