African American Education: From Slave to Free

The Role of Literacy

Nearly every American colony, and later state, prohibited or restricted teaching free and enslaved African Americans to read or write. South Carolina was the first. As early as 1740, the colony enacted a law that forbade the teaching of enslaved African Americans. Thirty years later, colonial Georgia enacted a similar statute.

In the American South restrictions against African American literacy grew worse during the antebellum or pre-Civil War era. The laws against teaching enslaved African Americans to read and write during the first half of the nineteenth century grew out of a variety of fears and concerns, the most straightforward concern being the use of literacy as a means to freedom (such as the forging of passes for escape).

By 1840, the slave-sanctioning states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia imposed punishment such as fines, public whippings, and/or imprisonment on anyone caught teaching enslaved or free African Americans. Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee never legally forbade the teaching of enslaved African Americans, but public opinion against African American literacy had so hardened that the actual opportunities for enslaved Blacks and free persons of color to learn decreased as much as in states where illiteracy was legally mandated. Mississippi, Missouri, and Maryland never statutorily penalized anyone associated with teaching African Americans. Rather, they barred public assemblages of African Americans for educational purposes and strongly discouraged Whites from assisting Blacks in “book learning.”

Harsh Repression

Local sentiment served as an additional impediment to Southern-born African Americans becoming literate during the antebellum era. Proslavery ideologues assumed only madmen would teach their slaves to read or mingle with literate free Blacks. Most believed that slaves should only receive instruction that would qualify them for their “particular station” in life. These sentiments were ingrained points of view by the 1840s, and they complemented the growing number of aforementioned laws banning or hindering literacy among African Americans. Similarly, they served not only as a rationale for the continued maintenance of hereditary slavery and de jure (by law) segregation of African Americans in a democratic society, but also to validate the pseudo-science of the day that determined African Americans to be by nature genetically inferior and accordingly incapable of learning.

...