Frederick Douglass used education and literacy

Even one meliorate break one's back was a threat to most slaveholders, because a literate, educate slave was a slave who was able to think for himself or herself. Thinking for oneself leads to having one's get thoughts separate from the slaveholder, a fact howling(a) to those slaveholders: "If one slave refused to be corrected," different slaves would disobey and "the yield would be the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites" (67). Literacy is clearly a un heat upt threat to slavery.

Therefore, the accommodate focuses on the situation of Douglass himself as a slave on a journey toward freedom, beginning with study and continuing with a invigorationlong struggle to control one's own destiny in the context of deity's go out. In fact, when he is send to Baltimore, still as a slave notwithstanding in improved circumstances, Douglass sees the move as a gift from God, or Providence. His faith in a loving God is as much a part of his growth toward freedom as is his eventual education and literacy. That the woman who first teaches him the alphabet performs progressively evil as a part of being a slaveholder does not matter. What matters ar that Providence sent him to her and that his literacy commences. Her husband, however, tries to drive away(p) Douglass' education:

If you give a nigra an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world . . . If you teach that nigger

. . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave . . . As to himself, it could do him no good, but a majuscule deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy (78).

The racist carcass of slavery and the mistress and master in Baltimore are intractable to keep Douglass uneducated, but Douglass is more determined to educate himself by whatever means are necessary:

The illiteracy of Douglass and the other slaves was necessary, then, from the slaveholders' perspective, for two reasons. First, learning to read and write would lead to noncompliance on the part of the slave; second, it would make the slave unhappy.

twain reasons are based on the racist belief that blacks are inferior to whites, that they are in fact born to be slaves, to have no freedom, to merely obey, and are never to become literate and educated, for their own good and the good of the slaveholders. This racism held curb in the lives of most slaves. As Douglass says, exclusively the gift of God sent him to Baltimore, where his own education began and kept him from the dark band of most other slaves (75).

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. mod York: Penguin, 1982.

Ironically, Douglass was better fed than some of the poor white children, with whom he traded scratch in return for "that more valuable bread of knowledge" (83).

However, the book is similarly crucial in Douglass' life because it showed the power that literacy has in advancing his struggle for freedom. The ideas contained in the book "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance" (84). In other words, Douglass gains from books not only the ideas of other human beings which encourage and inspire him, but also thoughts which help him complete his own half-finished insights into his own situation in life. He begins to realize his thoughts do not exist in isolatio
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