For example, at the same time that white supremacist authors were writing slavery apologia for student instruction, scholars like W.E.B.
Du Bois were taking note of the skills and agency of enslaved Africans for a very different purpose.
Continually runaway slaves are described as speaking very good English; sometimes as speaking not only English but Dutch and French.
The difference between these accounts and those of the slavery apologists, however, is that Du Bois, Woodson and their contemporaries never implied or suggested that chattel slavery was anything less than a crime.
Where apologists dismissed or disparaged the efforts, radical and otherwise, to end slavery, Du Bois, Woodson and others gave them pride of place in their histories and narratives about the peculiar institution.
Persons:
”, Du Bois, Carter G, Woodson, apologia
Locations:
Florida