Anti-literacy law

Anti-literacy law is legislation outlawing the teaching of literacy to a group or groups of people.

In the United States

See also: Education_during_the_Slave_Period

Anti-literacy laws were in force in many slave states before and during the American Civil War regarding slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color.[1] These largely came into force following abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion[2] and Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831. Between 1829 and 1834 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina and Virginia all passed anti-literacy laws.[3] Punishment for breaking the laws varied. In North Carolina, for example, black people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine and/or jail time. [4] Educators in the South found ways to both circumvent and challenge the law. John Berry Meachum, for example, moved his school out of St. Louis, Missouri when that state passed an anti-literacy law in 1847, and re-established it on a steamship on the Mississippi River, which was beyond the reach of Missouri state law.[5] After she was arrested, tried, and served a month in prison for educating free black children in Norfolk, Virginia, Margaret Crittendon Douglas wrote a book on her experiences which helped draw national attention to the anti-literacy laws. [6] Laws restricting the education of black students were not limited to the South; in 1833 after black and white abolitionists founded a boarding school for African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, the state legislature outlawed the instruction of 'colored students who were not inhabitants of the state', and the school was burned down shortly thereafter. [7]

References

  1. ↑ "Illegal to Teach Slaves to Read and Write". Harper's Weekly. June 21, 1862.
  2. ↑ Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass Oxford University Press, USA, Apr 6, 2006, p. 445
  3. ↑ Christine Pawley, Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America, Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2010
  4. ↑ North Carolina Digital History, http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/4384
  5. ↑ Robert W.Tabscott John Berry Meachum Defied The Law to Educate Blacks, St. Louis Beacon, August 25, 2009
  6. ↑ Douglass, Margaret, Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a Southern Woman Who Was Imprisoned for One Month in the Common Jail of Norfolk, John P. Jewett and Co., 1854
  7. ↑ Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, Univ of North Carolina Press, Nov 20, 2009, p.17


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