Earlier chapters have suggested that competitions in America's emerging information economy in the twentieth century stimulated and claimed the skills of an increasingly literate population. The deepening involvement of reading and, most recently, writing in the production of wealth has conditioned opportunities for literacy, shaping the ways that resources and incentives for literacy learning arrive to people in particular times and places. It also accounts for inequities in opportunity, shaping the ways that the resources, chances, and rewards for literacy learning are distributed unevenly. Patterns of past economic competition install themselves in the makeup of reading and writing and linger in the foundations on which succeeding generations of learners encounter the puzzles of literacy. These patterns also regulate the pace at which forms and standards of literacy fall and rise.

This argument is further scrutinized here through life history accounts involving 16 African Americans. Where the skills of reading and writing have developed among African Americans, it has rarely been at the vigorous invitation of economic sponsors. Relegated for centuries to mostly physical labor and domestic service, African Americans have rarely seen their literacy development figured into the needs of the nation – except in periods of temporary crisis. One such crisis was World War II, when a high rate of illiteracy among Southern men and black Southern men in particular created human resource problems for the U.S. military.