By Tamara Shiloh

Anti-literacy laws were used by Southern plantation owners throughout the antebellum period. An extension of the slave codes, forcing illiteracy was a tactic used to dehumanize and control enslaved Blacks. Under Mississippi law, a white person could serve up to a year in prison as “penalty for teaching a slave to read.”

Despite attempts to keep enslaved people from learning, Blacks would develop strategies to educate themselves.

Lilly Ann Granderson (1816–1889) was born a slave in Virginia. Little has been recorded about her childhood, but it is known that early on she was relocated to Kentucky. There she became close to her owner’s children, who taught young Lilly Ann to read and write.

It was through reading that Lilly learned about places in the North where slavery had been abolished; places she wanted to see, to live. What no one knew was the true lesson Lilly was learning: The path to freedom is education.

Lilly Ann wanted to share her knowledge with others. It was not illegal for slaves to read and write in Kentucky, but it wasn’t encouraged, and one could be severely punished. On Sundays, Lilly would visit with friends enslaved on the plantation. They would hide in the woods and recite the alphabet, drawing the letters in the dirt.

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After a few years, the lessons would come to an end.

After her owner’s death, Lilly was sold to a Mississippi slaveholder, and began to work in his cotton fields. Unaccustomed to the tough labor and heat, her health began to fail. She was then moved to her owner’s home in Natchez.

It was there that Granderson recalled the lessons she learned and taught in Kentucky and decided to force change. Again, she risked severe punishment, even death, to secretly establish a midnight school for the enslaved.

Local authorities were blind to Granderson’s plans. Classes, attended by only 12 students at a time, were held at night from 11:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. Over the course of seven years, hundreds passed through the secret classroom. After they learned to read and write, they graduated. Twelve more children then became Granderson’s students.

The pioneering educator helped many to escape slavery because they learned to forge freedom passes.

But the news eventually leaked to local authorities. Even so, neither Lilly nor her students were arrested. It was discovered that although laws existed prohibiting whites and free Blacks from educating slaves, there were none against a slave teaching another slave.

In 1863, Union troops occupied Natchez. With them came missionaries from the North to establish schools for the enslaved. They had no idea that Granderson had already been educating Blacks. They were surprised to learn that she, too, was a slave. As a freedwoman, she was hired as a teacher by the American Missionary Association.

Share with the youth the importance of literacy and the struggle to make it possible for Black children. Read to them Janet Halfmann’s “Midnight Teacher: Lilly Ann Granderson and Her Secret School.”