This skit depicts two students, one student chastising the other for having a slothful mother who keeps him from getting to school on time. I wanted to know what it was like to be a nine—year-old child, and to stand on stage and act out a script that depicted your mother—and by extension the other mothers at the school—as being too lazy, or too ignorant to understand the great importance of getting to school on time.
These were children, Black children in a slave nation no less, reading words written for them by white adults, which they dramatized before a public that would judge them on their performance. Educated for Freedom is a response to that objection. Much work on Black abolitionism has stressed the ways in which the activists sought, understandably, to gain access to a citizenship that was coded both male and adult. I sought to structure the book in a way that braided the personal with the political, the needs of a child, with the demands of a citizen, to reflect how mutually constitutive these terms were in the process of determining how slavery was defined, attacked, and defended in the years leading to the Civil War.
AMD: The book begins with Black students being told that they could never be fully American, and ends with one of those students speaking before Congress: that journey helps us understand the power of Black political organizing both in the public and private realms. The impoverished sons of enslaved mothers, they managed to meet the Marquis de Lafayette, earn a Medical degree, fight off angry mobs, influence John Brown and his fateful raid, speak before crowds of thousands, challenge the terms of white abolitionism , and address Congress.
And then I enrolled in an early American literature class, and I was hooked. I was immediately intrigued by how the New England settlers worked so diligently to place their suffering—and the suffering they imposed on so many others—within a coherent symbolic framework.
Instead, they have been key to how the U. My second project—in the very early stages—will be a developing series of biographies of the New York African Free School students aimed for younger audiences. JF: What led you to write Educated for Freedom? JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of Educated for Freedom?
