Lessons in Freedom from the American South

• In Event: Black Educators, Freedom and the Intellectual Imagination in the 19th-20th Centuries

Abstract

This paper will look at two figures, Lucy Craft Laney and Anna Julia Cooper, as not only educators but as students of freedom themselves. What were their curricular experiences growing up in Macon and in Raleigh, respectively, that led them to their positions as prominent educators in Augusta, Georgia and in Washington, DC? Furthermore, how did their experiences as students of enslavement and freedom translate into lessons about what freedom should look like in its lived experience(s) for their students? The presentation draws from Anna Julia Cooper’s statement that “We look back, not to become inflated with conceit because of the depths from which we have arisen, but that we may learn wisdom from experience” (Cooper 27).

Arguing that “we can give ourselves” (281), Cooper writes black women into conversations of racial “uplift," but she is as concerned with past efforts of racial progress as with future opportunities for black men and black women. Additionally, after gaining her freedom, Lucy Craft Laney went on to start the first black kindergarten and the first nursing school for black women in Augusta, Georgia, in addition to a very reputable school called Haines Industrial and Normal Institute in 1886 that was recognized by such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Through speeches and essays, Laney also reflected on the distance from which blacks had come in just a short period of freedom and instructed mothers on how to build their children up at home to be successful and productive as the first generation of free adults. By setting up both personal narratives and ideals of social progress as curricula for life, Cooper and Laney argue for education and institutional opportunities as means for women (and in effect, men as well) to achieve real social progress.

Author

• Janaka Bowman Lewis, UNC Charlotte