Students at a Freedmen’s School in Virginia, ca. 1870s, and a One-Cent Primer “The people are hungry and thirsty after knowledge,” a former slave observed immediately after the Civil War. African American leader Booker T. Washington remembered “a whole race trying to go to school.” The students at this Virginia school stand in front of their log-cabin classroom reading books, but more common were eight-page primers that cost a penny. These simple readers offered ex-slaves the elements of literacy. For people long forbidden to learn to read and write, literacy symbolized freedom. Literacy also allowed those who were deeply religious to experience the joy of reading the Bible for themselves and those who were merely practical to understand labor contracts and participate knowledgeably in politics.
Primer: Gladstone Collection; students: Valentine Museum, Cook Collection.