The Dangers of an Educated Black Man

In late August, 1619, a group of Africans landed at Point Comfort, Virginia aboard the English privateer White Lion. Rather than given books and bibles to i prove their lives, they were treated as slaves and bound in shackles. From the time forward, young Black men have been looked upon as dangerous and in need of control.  And one of the primary ways to enact that control was to deny them an education including the ability to read.

   Slavery was a systematic process of dehumanization, and purposely keeping slaves illiterate was an important method of validating their sub-human status. The system relied on portraying slaves as ignorant chattel completely reliant on their white enslavers. By denying enslaved people the ability to read, write, articulate complex thoughts, or access any uplifting ideas beyond crude labor, slave owners could more effectively strip them of their self-worth and dignity.

   In the slaveholding South's warped ideology, the seed of education had the perceived danger of making enslaved people discontent with their forced bondage. It could fuel aspirations of freedom, independent thought or recognition of their own humanity - all qualities deemed an existential threat to the institution of slavery.

   The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass vividly described in his autobiography how his master's wife momentarily began teaching him the alphabet as a child, until her husband intervened: "If you teach that nigger how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He should know nothing but to obey his master - to do as he is told to do."

   By denying his chattel an education, the master could more easily maintain total domination over a people with no sense of self-identity beyond forced submission. The plantation owners also feared that literacy could expose slaves to dangerous ideas which could incite uprisings, violence or mass defiance against their authority. White slaveholders lived in perpetual dread of the bloodshed that could ensue if enslaved populations started developing ideas of liberation or organized resistance taught through banned writings. Slave rebellions like those led by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the early 19th century fueled these anxieties. This fear was so  pronounced  that an 1829 Kentucky court ruling made it illegal to distribute "seditious literature" among the enslaved:

   "We would never permit...that species of malicious and hellish compassion which, by planting among ourselves the seeds of insurrection, should spread desolation...over our smiling fields and gardens."

   Slave owners constantly confiscated books, newspapers, pamphlets, letters - virtually any type of written material that could theoretically expose enslaved people to "incendiary" philosophies such as liberty, human rights, or the abolitionist movement taking shape in the North.

   White Southerners also had compelling financial motivations to avoid any disruption to the productivity extracted from their slave labor. Fundamentally, slavery was a system rooted in the elite's greed to amass incredible generational wealth and economic power through free labor on their plantations. To optimize their profits, the plantation owners indoctrinated overseers to rule through harsh physical punishment and psychological coercion to maximize work output. The more ignorant and dehumanized slaveholders could keep their workers, the easier it became to extract every ounce of that labor from them while avoiding costly investments that could diminish their profits.

   South Carolina slaveholder Henry William Ravenel summarized this view in 1834 "The slave must remain as heretofore, a mere machine. He must be kept in that state of uncivilized brutality, which will secure his obedience."