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- Due to fear following the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in South Carolina in 1739, blacks were prohibited from learning to read. Plantation owners feared that literate slaves could write and use forged documents to gain their freedom. However, many of the enslaved used this method to obtain their freedom.
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Jun 17, 2020 · “Anti-literacy laws were written in response to the rise of abolitionism in the north,” says Breen. One of the most threatening abolitionists of the time was Black New Englander David Walker....
- Colette Coleman
Jan 12, 2022 · Anti-Literacy Laws and Abolitionist Frederick Douglass Confederate states in the antebellum South that passed anti-literacy laws included South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Alabama.
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.
Anti-literacy laws in half of the slave states ensured that nine-tenths of all slaves would remain illiterate; local ordinances, custom, or the lash suf-fi ced to discourage slave literacy in the others.8 Free blacks were repeatedly barred from conducting and attending schools.9 Law and custom curtailed the freedom of the press and censored the ...
During the antebellum period in the United States, anti-literacy laws were a major strategy used by southern plantation owners to dehumanize and control the enslaved black population.
North, abolitionists and missionaries started schools for African Americans in the early 1800s, but laws in the South would prevent the formal education of African Americans in the South until after the Civil War.
His critique of American democratic principles is further grounded in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laws that prevented Black people from literacy, effectively prohibiting their participation in a political society established from written texts and constitutions.
