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The George Moses Horton Project: Celebrating a triumph of literacy

By Marjorie Hudson

The only American poet to publish books of poems while living in slavery, George Moses Horton is an inspiration for the power of literacy in our lives.

"I took resolution to learn the alphabet at all events; and lighting by chance at times with some opportunities of being in the presence of school children, I learnt the letters by heart; and fortunately afterwards got hold of some old parts of spelling books abounding with these elements, which I learnt with but little difficulty…"

— G.M. Horton

On a sunny afternoon early in 2000, the director of the local arts council and a board member from the Black Historical Society met with the principal of Horton Middle School and proposed a partnership to educate children about George Moses Horton. The middle school was named for George Moses, but few people — including the principal, who was new in town — knew the whole story. The programs we created became key components in the George Moses Horton Project. Our dream was to link local schools to curricula that enhance literacy, creativity, and an appreciation of local history — through awareness of this extraordinary figure in the history of literacy.

By the following December, under sponsorship of the Chatham County Arts Council, the George Moses Horton Project had conducted thirteen educational residencies and programs in the schools, supplied more than 100 books and curriculum guides to the schools, and generated several programs that involved parents and the public at large. Folklorists and authors came from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One artist, inspired by our project, traveled from Florida. The creative director of a Durham opera company, elders from the local senior center, performance artists, poets, drummers, and African dancers all joined in our project with enthusiasm. Our school curricula culminated in a public event, the George Moses Horton Jubilee — it was standing room only in the middle school multi-purpose room. "It was extraordinary!" in the words of more than one evaluator.

How did all this happen? Key to the success of this program was the surprising, inspiring story of George Moses Horton, a figure known only to scholars and poets and a select few Chatham educators until recent years. Horton was a black man who lived as a slave in Chatham County from 1800 to 1865, when he walked away to freedom. While still living in bondage, he became a cause in the abolitionist movement, a voice for white and black progressives against slavery, and a successful, self-supporting, and eloquent poet. But first, he had to learn how to read.

Here, in a nutshell, is his story. Horton was the only American poet to publish books of poems while living in slavery. As a boy, he struggled to teach himself to read from scraps of primers discarded by his master’s children. While tending cattle, he began to make up rhymes and commit them to memory. As a young man, commissioned to sell produce up the road in Chapel Hill, he dictated original love poems to university students for their girlfriends. At some point, he began to dream of purchasing his freedom by selling the product of his soul: his poetry. His poems by then had begun to address issues of freedom, nature’s beauty, human frailty, and slavery. On campus, a mentor helped him learn to write down the poems he had been inventing and memorizing since childhood and publish them in book form. In his later years, still in bondage, but now living on campus, he read Aristotle and lectured on world affairs to university students. He published two books of poetry while living in slavery, another after gaining freedom. A final manuscript giving his thoughts on world affairs was lost.

We know much about Horton’s life because his story is reflected in his poetry and because he left behind an extraordinary document — an autobiography of a man whose unique struggle to read and write and express himself was daring — a matter of life or death. Literacy for slaves was against the law.

I admit to being something of a fanatic on the subject of George Moses Horton. As a poet, I am inspired by his audacity and his love of language. As a parent and community activist, I see that his story has power to inspire and unite young people. How I became so interested in Horton is story in itself. I had gone to my child’s 8th-grade social studies class to teach on an area of local history. I knew a little bit about Horton and took the opportunity to mention him, saying, "You ought to learn more about him, he lived in Chatham County." The teacher took me aside and told me the school was named for Horton. I didn’t quite believe him. I was the one who was about to learn more about Horton.

I had been driving my stepdaughter to school and to soccer practice for years, and I had never heard "George Moses" mentioned — the school sign just said "Horton." I was a little embarrassed I had not known. Was he a secret? I spoke my questions to neighbors and to friends. Turned out some of them claimed descendancy from Horton. Some of them knew the origin of the school name, some did not. Horton’s story had been kept alive in Chatham County by oral history and family stories, but only the alumni of the original segregated school knew the whole story — who Horton was, and why a school for black children might be named for him.

I began to see that Horton’s struggle for literacy and freedom was a story that was so personal and so inspiring, it could lead both educators and children to a better understanding of our own history and community and of the extraordinary power of reading, writing, and self-expression. Perhaps it could even provide entry into the discussion of issues of racial prejudice, segregation, and how the history of a school can divide and unite us as a community. Horton’s poems and autobiography, rare written accounts, are a rich trove that gives us access to the thinking and language of a single individual in a complex point in history.

The curriculum we created was a collaborative effort between grade 5-8 teachers and outside educators in the arts, creative writing, and folklore. Over the summer and into the fall, many a spaghetti dinner at my table fostered lesson plans, budgets, grant writing, and agreements, until by late September we had both the promise of funding and a schedule of classes that would transform how schoolchildren thought about black history, writing, and reading.

Here are a few of the programs we developed and used in the classroom in Chatham County. A number of our programs used teams of black and white educators to model the cooperation and teamwork we hoped to elicit in students.

  • Oral History Project: Hard Times in Chatham County (8th Grade: Social Studies): Our most ambitious program. Two classrooms taught by Dawn Streets participated in this project. Led by folklorists Joy Salyers and Michelle McCullers working as a team, twelve sessions included lesson plans on school history, personal history, and family history, training and certification in oral history interview techniques, training in recorder and camera use, in-class and family practice interviews, and a morning session of interviews at the Senior Center. Of particular interest to students and folklorists were the opportunities to interview elders in the black community about their educational history.
  • Poetry and Performance Project (7th grade: Language Arts): The skilled educator/performers of the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance led Sandy Carver’s and Cynthia Strange’s Horton Middle seventh-grade classes through six weeks of choreography and performance exercises, poetry writing sessions, and lessons on group performance, culminating in a presentation at the Jubilee.
  • Horton Poetry Competition (Multiple grades: Language Arts): A Horton poetry chapbook inspired works on the subjects of Friendship, Rural Life, Mortality, and Summer in Chatham County. Cosponsored by the Chatham County Reading Association.
  • The George Moses Horton Freedom Path Mosaic (5th Grade: Art, Language Arts, Social Studies): During a five day intensive residency, artists in residence Roxie Thomas and Janice Rieves worked with Horton Middle’s fifth-grade classes to create a mosaic "Freedom Path" in the central school courtyard, near the site of the Old Horton School. Teachers Daphne Hill and Judy Ingram took the lead, reading aloud stanzas of Horton’s poem "On Summer" and challenging students to draw pictures of the many images in the poem — birds, horses, fields, rivers, farmers, churches, sun, sky — that reflect Chatham’s rural life now and in the nineteenth century. Drawings were transposed onto templates, and students learned how the process of creating a mosaic is like the mosaic itself — it requires many pieces to make a whole.
  • African Dance and Drum (Multiple grades: Music, Dance, World Culture, and Language Arts): In a series of classroom workshops culminating in an assembly at Horton Middle School, Durham jazz drummer Beverly Botsford worked with native Chatham African Dancer Sherone Price, inviting students to join in cooperative traditional African chants, rhythms, and dances.
  • Horton School Chorale (Multiple Grades: Music): The Arts Council commissioned an original work of music based on lyrics from a Horton poem and voiced for middle school voices; premiere performance was staged at Jubilee, with ninety students led by music teacher Amelia O’dell.

The Chatham County Arts Council continues to sponsor programs of special interest on the subject of our county’s Historic Poet Laureate. In the spring of 2001, our Project challenged students to visit the Academy of American Poets website to vote for Horton for a U.S. Postage stamp. Check the arts council website for more suggestions for in-class curricula, and for fact sheets, print media, web resources, and a list of artistic works inspired by Horton. We hope to post lesson plans from some of our programs on the LEARN NC site by April 2002, in time for Poetry Month, Library Week, and the N.C. Literary Festival/George Moses Horton Society Conference at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Chatham County Arts Council encourages teachers to use these resources to build their own curricula on the subject of Horton’s life and work. We think George Moses might enjoy being an inspiration for the power of literacy in our lives 200 years after he came to Chatham County, a three-year-old with a passion for learning.