Explore "Sidelights on Negro Soldiers" by Charles Williams on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IN CAMP
The late Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, said that two hundred thousand men out of the first two million composing the American army could neither write to their mothers and fathers nor read the letters written to them. Just how many Negro soldiers were illiterate will probably never be known, but it is certain that tens of thousands of them could not read or write. The percentage of illiteracy was highest in the non-combatant units, where education was not primarily essential and where the first requirement was that the men be physically fit to do the heavy work necessary. In such organizations it was not unusual to find that 75 per cent of the men were illiterate. At one time when an order was given a company that all men who could neither read nor write should step forward, practically the whole company advanced.