Download or read book Liberating Language written by Shirley Wilson Logan and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2008-09-11 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the ways that African Americans learned lessons in rhetoric through language-based activities associated with black survival in nineteenth-century America, such as working in political organizations, reading and publishing newspapers, maintaining diaries, and participating in literary societies. It shows how rhetorical training was manifested through places of worship and military camps, self-education in oratory and elocution, literary societies, and the black press. It also draws on the experiences of various black rhetors of the era, such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Fanny Coppin, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and the lesser-known Oberlin-educated Mary Virginia Montgomery, Virginia slave preacher "Uncle Jack," and former slave "Mrs. Lee." The book also outlines nontraditional means of acquiring rhetorical skills and demonstrates how African Americans, faced with the lingering consequences of enslavement, acquired rhetorical competence.