Grace Hunt

“For people who had been prohibited from learning to read and write as slaves, reading offered tangible proof that they were really free.”
― Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans

“The desire to read the Bible for themselves - the Bible the slaveholders had so long misrepresented to them- motivated a good many former slaves to seek education.
For Northern teachers, whether white or black, education had a moral purpose. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they believed schools ought to instill habits of thrift, honesty, punctuality, temperance, and discipline to the ex-slaves, who seemed to be lax about these moral virtues. The former slaves, however, insisted God was not going to punish them for every little sin. For them the essence of religion was not in observing rules and regulations, but in experiencing the power of God's grace within their hearts.”
― Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans

“The former slaves preferred to focus on feeling the power of God's loves, in the tradition of the invisible institution of their parents and grandparents.”
― Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans

“One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation