“Learning to Read” and the rest of the Aunt Chloe poems originally appeared in Watkins Harper’s collection Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a poetic response to the Reconstruction period.

Lasting from 1865 through 1877, the Reconstruction period marked the period after the Civil War. The US government attempted to compensate African Americans for slavery while readmitting the eleven treasonous Confederate states into the United States.

These goals came into odds since the South’s desire to legally preserve slavery and white supremacy led to their secession from the US. As a result, white supremacists undid these programs when they regained a foothold in southern state governments and passed laws restricting voting rights. White southerners increasingly terrorized and attacked Black citizens in retribution for going “agin’ their rule” (Line 4). Watkins Harper alludes to hate crimes, and white resentment: “how the Rebs did hate it” and the “Rebs did sneer and frown” (Lines 3 and 28)

However, there were successes during the Reconstruction period too. The federal government successfully added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments, respectively, illegalized slavery and indentured servitude, granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to anyone born or naturalized as an American, and enabled men to vote regardless of their race, color, and previous status as an enslaved person.