Description: Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom
Brief description: Heather Andrea Williams, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office, is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Review Quotes:
"Self-Taught is not merely the most comprehensive documentation and analysis of African American education in the South during the 1861-1871 period, it is in every respect the first definitive study of the formative stages of universal literacy and formal education among ex-slaves. Never before has anyone described so fully the broad range of roles and the significant contributions of African Americans to the development of formal and public education in the South for themselves and for the entire region." --James D. Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935