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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.
Jan 12, 2022 · Anti-literacy laws made it illegal for enslaved and free people of color to read or write. Southern slave states enacted anti-literacy laws between 1740 and 1834, prohibiting anyone from teaching enslaved and free people of color to read or write.
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African American literacy wasn’t just problematic to enslavers because of the potential for illuminating Biblical readings. “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. From 1829-1830, he distributed the...
Black Americans’ literacy also threatened a major justification of slavery—that Black people were “less than human, permanently illiterate and dumb,” Lusane says. “That gets disproven when African Americans were educated, and undermines the logic of the system.” States fighting to hold on to slavery began tightening literacy laws in the early 1830s...
Antislavery ideas had already spread, largely through the written word. As Roth points out, “Literacy promotes thought and raises consciousness. It helps you to get outside of your own cultural constraints and think about things from a totally different angle.” The view that slavery was wrong and should be ended was reinforced through written texts...
- Colette Coleman
Anti-literacy laws were a natural extension of the slave code system, preventing the enslaved black population from learning how to read in any form (Rush 1773, p. 17). This was important for obvious reasons: Making it illegal for black people to learn to read and write reinforced the notion that Africans were inferior to whites.
To continue the institution of slavery and prohibit the widespread learning of literacy among both the enslaved and freedmen, anti literacy laws were passed in a number of states including Alabama, Georgia , Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Missouri, North and South Carolina.
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Jun 24, 2024 · Anti-literacy laws had been in place since the inception of slavery and were a primary method of denying Black men the right to vote under the 15th Amendment’s changes. In 1880, according to the U.S. Bureau of Census , 76 percent of southern African Americans were illiterate, a rate of 55 percent points greater than that for southern white ...
Jun 16, 2023 · In 1849, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed several anti-literacy laws. In particular, one piece of legislation stated that white people were forbidden from aiding Blacks in learning to read or write:
