Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by Heather Andrea Williams The University of North Carolina Press March 2005 $29.95, ISBN 0-807-82920-X

Legislation in the 1820s and after the Civil War prohibited enslaved blacks from learning how to read and write. The law then: "Punished with death, or imprisonment at hard labor for life, 'whosoever shall write, print, publish or distribute any thing having a tendency to produce discontent among the free coloured population of the state, or insubordination among the slaves therein.'"

In Self-Taught, Heather Andrea Williams, a former attorney with the U.S Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General's Office, offers a passionate historical analysis of the myriad ways that blacks resisted these laws and learned how to read and write despite the dreadful consequences.

Williams meticulously combed through Union records and American Missionary Association documents to find the black people who had appeared to be absent from texts that positioned northern whites as the only literacy activists. Instead, Williams determined that freed people, not northern whites, began their quest for literacy, even before "freedom."

Williams introduces activists like Elijah Marrs, a self-taught Union sergeant. He taught other black soldiers to read, and after he and his brother Henry left the army, they formed their own school in 1866.

Williams, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, demonstrates that blacks were acutely aware of the value of education and that literacy was--and is--an "instrument of resistance, liberation" and upward mobility.

Upon finishing Self-Taught, the reader will be changed. Untold stories of protest and resistance come alive through Williams's expert analysis and captivating storytelling.

Tiffany Simpkins is an educator and a doctoral student in Atlanta, Georgia. She is also the founder of Sisters of the Blossoming Pear Tree, a mentorship program (www.sbpt.org).