Stuggling to Make the Grain into Butter

The section entitled Charlotte Forten and the Port Royal Commission in Jaqueline Royster's "Going Against the Grain" in my eyes starts an entirely new perspective on the struggles that Africans in America have faced. Of course throughout the entire piece, and in the many repetitive readings like it, the empowerment of us as African Americans and women especially is emphasized,  in focusing on how important literacy is. But being the type of person that I am, historical context as opposed to mere opinions sits better with me because I tend to think critically. Before telling the story of Charlotte Forten, Royster gives reference to the Civil War, and basically stresses that because we were still not equal in the eyes of our "superiors" (i.e. former slave owners), even after the Emancipation Proclamation, we now fought in the "crusade against slavery" to be seen as human beings. What caught my attention was the mention of the political side to the war, i.e. that it was once a battle for economic power over southern agricultural resources (though at the time African slaves were a "resource" themselves).   


Before the Emancipation Proclamation, yet during the heat of the war, a battle between the Union and Confederate soldiers took place on Hilton Head Island on November 7, 1861. The Union victory brought about more than a Confederate loss of southern ports, but more importantly a loss of "contraband". This "contraband", now belonging to the U.S. Treasury Department, consisted of 50 plantations worth of African men, women, and children; 10,000 newly freed people without housing, substinence, or the education necessary to  acquire these things on an alien planet. With this, the Port Royal Experiment uggested by Edward L. Pierce began, which provided government assistance to freed "contraband", or former enslaved persons. Also with this experiment, claims were to be made on land and critical resources lost after the battle as well. The jobs of missionaries during this time was to cultivate those African-Americans who were now free. And although northern missionaries did believe that Black people deserved freedom and educational opportunities, they still failed to see them as equal human beings. 


This was the part that got me. How were white northerners who had a sense of superiority embedded in them throughout the years of slavery (that technically were still continuous at the time) expected to "cultivate" and improve the lives of those who they had been previously taught to oppress and conquer? Though they were "passionately committed" to the cause of beginning the process of cultivation, they were still nevertheless White. In further reading this text, it became apparent to me that Charlotte Forten had the same views in mind. She understood what it meant to be dedicated to her people in times of hardship and mistreatment, and aside from her socioeconomic stature, she never forgot who or where she came from.