Timeline: Education of African-Americans in Virginia before the Civil War

1619

The first Africans are brought against their will to Virginia and sold to work in bondage to support the Virginia colony.

Education in the colony generally took two forms in the next 150+ years: private tutoring at home for the sons and sometimes daughters of wealthy landowners, and apprenticeships or job training for children of the younger classes, typically not including education in reading or writing unless necessary for the job. Enslaved persons and free Black citizens

1723

An enslaved person (or persons) from Virginia write an extraordinary letter to entreat Bishop Edmund Gibson of London to free them from bondage and allow their children to be taught to read (Ingersoll, 1994). At thsi time, teaching an enslaved person to read or write was rare but not illegal, and there were a handful of schools in the Colony that taught enslaved people "Biblical literacy" (Bly, 2019).

“wee desire that our Childarn be putt to Scool and and Larnd to Reed”

1760-1774

A school for the children of enslaved people operates in Williamsburg. A second school is open in Fredricksburg from 1765-1770. Over 400 Black children are estimated to have learned to read and write in these schools (Bly, 2019).

1803-1805

A number of acts of the General Assembly restrict the free movement of enslaved people after the planned (but thwarted) revolt by enslaved people known as "Gabriel's Conspiracy"). These new laws restrict assembly by free and enslaved Black people, but they do not explicitly outlaw schools or education of Black people. (Bly, 2019).

1819

The General Assembly's 1819 laws explicitly stated, "[A]ll meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at [...] any school or schools for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly" ("The Revised Code", 1819).

This act does not prevent individuals from teaching Black individuals to read and write; it simply prohibits schools for the education of Black children.

1849

The General Assembly Page 747, Chapter 198

Section 31. Every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of religious worship, when such worship is conducted by a negro, and every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night-time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly : any Justice may issue his warrant to any officer, or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other Justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes.

" Sec. 32. If a white person assemble with negroes for the pur pose of instructing them to read or write, or if he associate with them in an unlawful assembly, he shall be confined in jail not exceeding six months, and fined not exceeding one hundred dollars; and any Justice may require him to enter into a recognizance, with sufficient security, to appear before the Circuit, County, or Corporation Court, where the offence was committed, at its next term, to answer therefor ; and in the meantime, to keep the peace and be of good behavior."

1854

What may be the first prosecution of the 1849 laws against educating any Black person, enslaved or free, occurred in Norfolk in 1854.

Mrs. Margaret Douglass of Norfolk is sentenced to a month-long imprisonment for teaching free 25 Black children to read and write in her own home for 11 months.

The Douglass story is fascinating - Douglass was, by her own description, not an abolitionist; in fact she had formerly been an enslaver herself, and part of her narrative is an explicit avowal of her belief in white supremacy (Douglass, 1854, p. 57) She did believe in educating all children, but she says that she would not have broken the law on purpose. Her defense was that she knew it was illegal to teach enslaved children, but she did not know that it was illegal to teach free Black children, as it was a common practice at the time for free Black children to read during Sunday School (Douglass, 1854). The judge in the case cited in great detail the concerns that northern Abolitionists were inciting insurrection against slavery by circulating anti-slavery writing and justified banning the education of free Black children as "as a matter of self-defense against the schemes of Northern incendiaries" (WGBH, 1998).

After her imprisonment, she published this astonishingly acerbic and sarcastic personal narrative, critizing the prohibition of education as, "one of the most inhumane and unjust laws that ever disgraced the statute book of a civilized community" (Douglass, 1854, 40) and stating that, "I have the satisfaction of knowing that I suffered in a good and righteous cause." (Douglass, 1854, p. 11).

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