My Aha moment came from "Learning To Read" by Francis Harper. As I read through the poem it explained to me how after the civil war, teachers came down to the southern states to start educating emancipated slaves, but it wasn’t all sunflowers and daisies. Southerners still resisted the thought of teaching former slaves to read. “Well, the Northern folks kept sending / the Yankee teachers down; / And they stood right up and helped us, though the Rebs did sneer and frown.” The “Rebs” is referring to the southerners and the poem goes into detail about how many slaves tried to teach themselves to read before the war by little things such as listening to kids spell out words and hiding books and papers in a hat. Even after the civil war, people still didn’t want African Americans to read. It was thought that for some blacks, learning to read was hopeless because they were too old, but they learned non-the-less.
Also in previous works we read, it seemed that Yankees didn’t help the African Americans before the war, but now they are sending all these teachers down to help educate them. It kind of says something about their character. Only after they won the war did they start to help the slaves, only after they knew that no one could come after them, did they start to help educated African Americans.
Also, I learned that African Americans wanted to read not only to be seen as equals but also so, they could read the bible. “So I got a pair of glasses, / And straight to work I went, / And never stopped till I could read / The hymns and Testament.” It’s interesting to me that the thing that southerners were afraid of, was the thing that African Americans wanted, but not for the purpose that the slaveholders thought.
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