Despite long work days and lack of encouragement from Thomas Jefferson, African Americans living at Monticello strove to learn their letters--from their friends or from Jefferson's grandchildren. Some taught their fellow slaves to read and write after 1831, when it was against Virginia law to educate blacks. Their descendants became schoolteachers and college professors and were active in the founding and leading of colleges and universities.

	Left: Letter written by enslaved woodworker John Hemmings to Jefferson's eleven-year-old granddaughter Septimia in 1825.
"I was teaching all the people around me to read and write, and even venturing to write free passes and sending slaves away from their masters." --Peter Fossett, 1898 "Peter Fossett taught my father to read and write by lightwood knots in the late hours of night when everyone was supposed to be asleep. They would steal away to a deserted cabin, over the hill from the big house, out of sight." --Charles Bullock, 1948.
"[Miss Woodson's school] is well-classified, thoroughly disciplined, and the children are making rapid progress in their studies and all that pertains to a well-ordered school life." --Report of General Superintendent of Freedmen's Bureau, Jan. 1, 1868	Left: Sarah Woodson graduated from Oberlin College in 1856 and taught English and Latin at Wilberforce University, the first African-American woman on a college faculty. After the Civil War she taught in Freedmen's schools in North Carolina. Below: Wilberforce University in 1856. A number of descendants were students or teachers at, or trustees of this coeducational all-black college operated by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
	Left: Sixteen-year-old Robert Scott writes in 1866 describing his experience as a student at the Charlottesville Freedmen's School. Scott soon became one of the first black teachers in Albemarle County. Below: His nephew Jesse Scott Sammons was teacher and principle of Union Ridge School, which later became Albemarle Training School.
	Left: Minerva Woodson, at far right, shown with her class in 1924, was one of the first teachers in the Memphis public school system.

"Aunt Minerva used to say and mother would say this after Minerva, learn something new every day and then share it. . . . I was never told that I was going to college. I grew up knowing that I was going to college."

--John Q. Taylor King,
Lt. General in the U.S. Army Reserve,
president emeritus of Huston-Tillotson College, Austin, Texas

 

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