Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

234 // EARL LEWIS
Frederick Douglass, tricked white kids into teaching them how to read and write
after white adults ended the practice. At times, emboldened Blacks and committed
whites simply ignored legal prohibitions until forced to cease their activities.
Prominent examples of breaches in protocol captivated white Richmonders in
1811 and Norfolkians in 1853. In the end, both communities punished those
among them who dared teach Blacks. 9
Even in the North educational opportunities for Blacks were mostly separate
and unequal. African Americans recognized this. Delegates to the 1832 National
Negro Convention maintained, "If we ever expect to see the influence of prejudice
decrease and ourselves respected, it must be by the blessings of an enlightened
education." 10 There were a few notable exceptions of course, particularly in
Philadelphia. There prominent citizens championed schooling for free Blacks as
early as the 1790s and built the Institute for Colored Youth in the 1840s, which
trained a generation of African American leaders. Elsewhere white northerners
flatly refused to educate Blacks or insisted that at the very least they attend separate
schools. 11
Certainly opposition to educational opportunities stemmed in large measure
from the overt threats to the institution of slavery. But education also threatened
to expose the intricacies of a mythic relationship. When colonial assemblies legislated
against intraracial sex for all but white men, they at once wrote the racial
politics of sex into the nation's history. Although successive generations of African
Americans wore the imprint of such unions on their visages, they remained distant
until African Americans, in writing themselves into being through autobiographies,
acknowledged such relations. When Frederick Douglass furtively mentioned
his father in his autobiography, he indicted that father as a co-conspirator
in his own bondage. 12 Education and literacy, especially from the pen of one as
eloquent as Douglass, underscored the institution of slavery's ability to distort all
relationships, including those between fathers and sons.
Jews, meanwhile, constituted a numerically insignificant proportion of the
slave-owning population and a small percentage of the nation's pre-Civil War
white population (roughly 15,000 in 1840). Significant demographic changes
came after the war, and with these changes came attendant alterations in educational
opportunities. Through the period when their numbers remained small,
few states introduced legislation to limit the education of Jews. For the most part
their racial and class positions mattered more than their religion or ethnicity.
Still, the majority of Americans Jews lived in communities chiefly dependent
upon other co-religionists. 13
Given the relatively small population of Jews, and their only marginal presence
in the South, the majority of them had little interaction with the majority
of Blacks. Consequently, one can talk about a Black and Jewish educational history
for the nineteenth century, but one is hard pressed to talk about a Black and
Jewish educational relationship. The exception sprang from intimate relationships
between Black women and white Jewish men.