Anti-literacy laws in the United States

Last updated

1839 Illustration in the Anti-Slavery Almanac of Black students excluded from school, with quote from Reverend Mr. Converse: "If the free colored people were taught to read, it would be an inducement for them to stay in the country. We would offer them no such inducement." Black students excluded 1839.gif
1839 Illustration in the Anti-Slavery Almanac of Black students excluded from school, with quote from Reverend Mr. Converse: "If the free colored people were taught to read, it would be an inducement for them to stay in the country. We would offer them no such inducement."

Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. [1] [2] Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." [3] Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, [4] and Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.

Contents

The United States is the only country known to have had anti-literacy laws. [5]

State anti-literacy laws

Between 1740 and 1834 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Virginia all passed anti-literacy laws. [6] South Carolina passed the first law which prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, punishable by a fine of 100 pounds and six months in prison, via an amendment to its 1739 Negro Act. [7] [8]

Some slaveowners blamed abolitionists for the supposed need for anti-literacy laws. For example, South Carolina's James H. Hammond, an ardent pro-slavery ideologue, wrote in a letter written in 1845 to the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson: "I can tell you. It was the abolition agitation. If the slave is not allowed to read his bible, the sin rests upon the abolitionists; for they stand prepared to furnish him with a key to it, which would make it, not a book of hope, and love, and peace, but of despair, hatred and blood; which would convert the reader, not into a Christian, but a demon. [...] Allow our slaves to read your writings, stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such unspeakable fools?" [9]

Significant anti-black laws include:

Mississippi state law required a white person to serve up to a year in prison as "penalty for teaching a slave to read." [12]

A 19th-century Virginia law specified: "[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes." [13]

In North Carolina, black people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine, jail time, or both. [14]

AME Bishop William Henry Heard remembered from his enslaved childhood in Georgia that any slave caught writing "suffered the penalty of having his forefinger cut from his right hand." Other formerly enslaved people had similar memories of disfigurement and severe punishments for reading and writing. [8]

Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee were the only three slave states that did not enact a legal prohibition on educating slaves. [15]

It is estimated that only 5% to 10% of enslaved African Americans became literate, to some degree, before the American Civil War. [15]

Restrictions on the education of black students were not limited to the South. [15] While teaching blacks in the North was not illegal, many Northern states, counties, and cities barred black students from public schools. [16] Until 1869, only whites could attend public schools in Indiana and Illinois. [16] Ohio excluded black children from public schools until 1849, when it allowed separate schools for black students. [16] Public schools were also almost entirely segregated in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. [16] Only Massachusetts had de-segregated public schools before the Civil War (it barred segregation in public schools in 1855). [15] [16] An attempt in 1831 to open a college for black students in New Haven, Connecticut was met with such overwhelming local resistance that the project was almost immediately abandoned (see Simeon Jocelyn). [17] Private schools that attempted to educate black and white students together, often opened by abolitionists, were destroyed by mobs, as in the case of Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire [18] and the Quaker Prudence Crandall's Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut. [17] After the Civil War, most Northern states legally prohibited segregation in public schools, although it often continued in practice, pre- Brown v. Board of Education , including through racially gerrymandered boundaries of school districts. [16]

Once, finding us all three busily writing, Violet stood for some moments silently watching the mysterious motion of our pens, and then, in a tone of deepest sadness, said: "O! dat be great comfort, Missis. You can write to your friends all 'bout ebery ting, and so hab dem write to you. Our people can't do so. Wheder dey be 'live or dead, we can't neber know—only sometimes we hears dey be dead." [19]

—  A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin , p. 375

Resistance

1863 painting of a man reading the Emancipation Proclamation. Stephens-reading-proclamation-1863.jpeg
1863 painting of a man reading the Emancipation Proclamation.

Educators and slaves in the South found ways to both circumvent and challenge the law. John Berry Meachum, for example, moved his school out of St. Louis, Missouri when that state passed an anti-literacy law in 1847, and re-established it as the Floating Freedom School on a steamship on the Mississippi River, which was beyond the reach of Missouri state law. [20] After she was arrested, tried, and served a month in prison for educating free black children in Norfolk, Virginia, Margaret Crittendon Douglas wrote a book on her experiences, which helped draw national attention to the anti-literacy laws. [21] Frederick Douglass taught himself to read while he was enslaved. [22] A runaway slave ad published in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1845 complained, "[Fanny] can read and write, and so forge passes for herself." [23] In Tennessee, "Any slave who forged a pass or certificate was to be whipped with not exceeding thirty-nine lashes; any person giving, or causing to be given...any other instrument of writing intended to aid the slave in escape from his master was to suffer imprisonment for not less than three nor more than ten years." [24]

Despite the risks, literacy was seen by the enslaved as a means of advancement and liberation, and they secretly learned from and taught one another. One historian noted that 20% of the runaway slaves in antebellum Kentucky were able to read, and 10% were able to write. Enterprising child slaves would trade items like marbles and oranges to white children in exchange for reading lessons, and adults sometimes learned from other adults, black and white. One enslaved man, Lucius Holsey, acquired a library of five books by selling rags: two spelling books, a dictionary, John Milton's Paradise Lost , and the Bible. With these five books, he painstakingly taught himself to read by memorizing single words. [8]

John Hope Franklin says that despite the laws, schools for enslaved Black students existed throughout the South, including in Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. In 1838, Virginia's free black population petitioned the state, as a group, to send their children to school outside of Virginia to bypass its anti-literacy law. They were refused. [8]

In some cases, slaveholders ignored the laws. They looked the other way when their children played school and taught their slave playmates how to read and write. Some slaveholders saw the economic benefit in having literate slaves who could undertake business transactions and keep accounts. Others believed that slaves should be sufficiently literate to read the Bible. [3]

In Norfolk, Virginia, the anti-literacy law was not abolished until after the Civil War, in 1867, as a result of black residents petitioning the federal government to end it. [25]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abolitionism</span> Movement to end slavery

Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery in the United States</span>

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is still legal in the United States.

David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harriet Jacobs</span> African-American abolitionist and writer (d. 1897)

Harriet Jacobs was an African-American abolitionist and writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an "American classic".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave codes</span> Subset of laws regarding chattel slavery and enslaved people

The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.

The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.

<i>Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass</i> Autobiography by Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by African-American orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is the first of Douglass's three autobiographies, the others being My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free Negro</span> Emancipated people of color

In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free, whether of African or mixed descent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Wells Brown</span> African-American abolitionist (1814 – 1884)

William Wells Brown was an American abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery near Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 19. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time. It was later published in the United States.

Antebellum South Carolina is typically defined by historians as South Carolina during the period between the War of 1812, which ended in 1815, and the American Civil War, which began in 1861.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave catcher</span> People who tracked down escaped slaves in the United States

A slave catcher is a person employed to track down and return escaped slaves to their enslavers. The first slave catchers in the Americas were active in European colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth century. In colonial Virginia and Carolina, slave catchers were recruited by Southern planters beginning in the eighteenth century to return fugitive slaves; the concept quickly spread to the rest of the Thirteen Colonies. After the establishment of the United States, slave catchers continued to be employed in addition to being active in other countries which had not abolished slavery, such as Brazil. The activities of slave catchers from the American South became at the center of a major controversy in the lead up to the American Civil War; the Fugitive Slave Act required those living in the Northern United States to assist slave catchers. Slave catchers in the United States ceased to be active with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

During the era of chattel slavery in the United States, the proper education of enslaved African Americans was highly discouraged, and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states.

Lily Ann Granderson, was an American educator. She was born a slave in Virginia in 1816. She has also been known as Milla Granderson. She was a pioneering educator who taught other enslaved people how to read and influenced the founding of Jackson State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in New York (state)</span>

The trafficking of enslaved Africans to what became New York began as part of the Dutch slave trade. The Dutch West India Company trafficked eleven enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in 1626, with the first slave auction held in New Amsterdam in 1655. With the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, more than 42% of New York City households enslaved African people by 1703, often as domestic servants and laborers. Others worked as artisans or in shipping and various trades in the city. Enslaved Africans were also used in farming on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, as well as the Mohawk Valley region.

<i>Life and Times of Frederick Douglass</i> Autobiography by Frederick Douglass

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is Frederick Douglass's third autobiography, published in 1881, revised in 1892. Because of the emancipation of American slaves during and following the American Civil War, Douglass gave more details about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery in this volume than he could in his two previous autobiographies. It is the only one of Douglass's autobiographies to discuss his life during and after the Civil War, including his encounters with American presidents such as Lincoln and Garfield, his account of the ill-fated "Freedman's Bank", and his service as the United States Marshall of the District of Columbia. Frederick Douglass shed light on what life was like as an enslaved person. Although it is the least studied and analyzed, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass allows readers to view his life as a whole.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States</span> Laws against interracial marriage

In the United States, many U.S. states historically had anti-miscegenation laws which prohibited interracial marriage and, in some states, interracial sexual relations. Some of these laws predated the establishment of the United States, and some dated to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treatment of slaves in the United States</span>

The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Mapps Douglass</span> American activist and artist (1806–1882)

Sarah Mapps Douglass was an American educator, abolitionist, writer, and public lecturer. Her painted images on her written letters may be the first or earliest surviving examples of signed paintings by an African American woman. These paintings are contained within the Cassey Dickerson Album, a rare collection of 19th-century friendship letters between a group of women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abolitionism in the United States</span>

In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Crittendon Douglass</span>

Margaret Crittendon Douglass was a Southern white woman who served one month in jail in 1854 for teaching free black children to read in Norfolk, Virginia. Refusing to hire a defense attorney, she defended herself in court and later published a book about her experiences. The case drew public attention to the highly restrictive laws against black literacy in the pre-Civil War American South.

References

  1. ↑ Williams, Heather Andrea (2009-11-20). Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. 13. ISBN   978-0-8078-8897-1.
  2. ↑ "Illegal to Teach Slaves to Read and Write". Harper's Weekly. June 21, 1862.
  3. 1 2 Banks, William M. (1996). Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life. W. W. Norton.
  4. ↑ Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, Oxford University Press, USA, Apr 6, 2006, p. 445
  5. ↑ Christopher M. Span; Brenda N. Sanya (2019). "Education and the African Diaspora". In Rury, John L.; Tamura, Eileen H. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education. Oxford University Press. p. 402.
  6. ↑ Cornelius, Janet Duitsman (1991). When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.
  7. ↑ "Slave Codes (20 November 2016)". Boundless U.S. History. Archived from the original on February 5, 2017. Retrieved 4 February 2017.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Span, Christopher (2005). "Learning in Spite of Opposition". Counterpoints. 31: 26–53. JSTOR   42977282 . Retrieved June 22, 2022.
  9. ↑ James Perrin Warren (1999). Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. Penn State University Press. pp. 118–193.
  10. ↑ Kim Tolley (2016). "Slavery". In Angulo, A. J. (ed.). Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 13–33. ISBN   978-1-4214-1932-9.
  11. ↑ "Negroes and Mullattoes" (PDF). Missouri Secretary of State. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  12. ↑ "Literacy and Anti-Literacy Laws". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved June 22, 2022.
  13. ↑ "Offences against public policy," Title 54, Chapter 198; "Assembling of negroes. Trading by free negroes," Section 31; in The Code of Virginia. Richmond: William F. Ritchie. 1849. p. 747. Retrieved 10 February 2017.
  14. ↑ North Carolina Digital History, http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4384 Archived 2016-03-01 at the Wayback Machine
  15. 1 2 3 4 Christopher M. Span & Brenda N. Sanya, "Education and the Africa Diaspora" in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (eds. John L. Rury & Eileen H. Tamura: Oxford University Press, 2019).
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Anderson, James D. (2022). Gary Orfield (ed.). Commentary. The Walls Around Opportunity. Princeton University Press. pp. 270–72.
  17. 1 2 Edna Edith Sayers, The Life and Times of T.H. Gallaudet (University Press of New England: 2017), pp. 210-12.
  18. ↑ Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), pp. 189-91.
  19. ↑ "A key to Uncle Tom's cabin; presenting the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded. Together with corroborative statements verifying ..." HathiTrust. p. 375. hdl:2027/uiug.30112003184378 . Retrieved 2023-08-25.
  20. ↑ Robert W.Tabscott John Berry Meachum Defied The Law to Educate Blacks, St. Louis Beacon, August 25, 2009
  21. ↑ Douglass, Margaret, Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a Southern Woman Who Was Imprisoned for One Month in the Common Jail of Norfolk, John P. Jewett and Co., 1854
  22. ↑ Douglass, Frederick (1851). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Written by himself. [With] Appendix. p. 39.
  23. ↑ "A key to Uncle Tom's cabin; presenting the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded. Together with corroborative statements verifying ..." HathiTrust. p. 444. hdl:2027/uiug.30112003184378 . Retrieved 2023-08-26.
  24. ↑ "Slavery in Tennessee, by Chase C. Mooney". HathiTrust. p. 13. hdl:2027/inu.32000002020263 . Retrieved 2023-08-26.
  25. ↑ "Equal Suffrage. Address from the Colored Citizens of Norfolk, Va., to the People of the United States, 1865, excerpt" (PDF). nationalhumanitiescenter.org.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.