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Frederick Douglas
According to Frederick Douglas, slavery and education are incompatible with each other for many reasons. First, education will lead to discontent and rebellion. Secondly, education provides to ability to express oneself which in turn fosters the creation of a new identity. and, education would allow the slave to see the inconsistency of slavery and, therefore, reject it as a moral institution.
Slave owners, Sophia and Hugh Auld repeatedly tried to stop Douglas and other slaves to read. According to Auld, "A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you taught him how to read it would do him nothing but harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." After Sophia stopped teaching him to read, Douglas said, "The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me.... She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other."
Douglas shares a dialogue he read in a book between an escaped slave and his master, where the speech of the slave is so convincing -- the identity of intellectual power so undeniable -- that the slave is emancipated. The slave had created a new identity through education that replaced the older one. Further, Douglas gives an example that if a slave were able to read the Sacred Scriptures, the slave would be able to see the inconsistency of slavery. Therefore slave owners deny education to slaves to prevent any change of the slave detecting any inconsistency in his or her position. Slaves must not know why they are slaves, or they would understand that their masters are robbers.
Ultimately, it is too difficult for slave owners to deny education to slaves and thus the inevitable downfall of slavery. On this matter, Douglass says that "[N]othing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries!"
Graff Asserts that literacy played a less significant role in the industrialization of American than was one thought. He argues that training people to read and write was not enough. Literacy alone was not enough to advance the industrialized nation (Cattau). Douglas did not need to know how to read to perform his job in the shipyard. He only needed to know how to write four letters. He did not
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) is most often remembered as being the "most prominent African-American orator, journalist and antislavery leaders of the 19th century." (Encarta) Douglass was himself an escaped slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. He published his autobiography in three complete versions, which depicted his life as a slave in the South and a runaway slave in the North. He described what life as a free black was
Douglass understands the importance of name which represent an assertion of identity, and identity is freedom: "I subscribe myself" -- I write my self down in letters, I underwrite my identity and my very being, as indeed I have done in and all through the foregoing narrative that has brought me to this place, this moment, this state of being." (Douglas 75 in Davis, Gates 157). This is why
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was an autobiography crafted by the famous former slave and abolitionist to illustrate the horror of slavery. Over the course of the narrative, Douglass uses a combination of pathos, logos, and ethos to convince the reader of his or her moral obligation to fight against the enslavement of
Stressing the shackles that slavery could latch to a man's mind, Douglass was given insight into the inherent transgression behind the bondage. And his ability to adopt such a perspective, while easy to underestimate from the distance of over a century, is quite remarkable given the overwhelming social constructions designed to deter that sort of thinking amongst his demographic. One of the more effective messages that he conveyed both
African-American Literature In literature the relationship between the text and paratext is used to introduce the reader to the subject and setting of novel. As the paratext, is utilized to inform and influence their minds before they have started reading the actual book. In African-American literature before the Civil War, this was a standard way publishers used to provide some kind of insights about what people were reading. To fully understand