Frederick Douglass' Use of Literacy

This study will examine the ways in which Frederick Douglass used education and literacy to gain and express his freedom in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. The opening pages of Douglass' autobiography include no sign of freedom. Slaves have their freedom stripped from them by the horrors of slavery, and slaveowners commit those horrors. An essential part of being a free human being, for Douglass, involves education, literacy and self-awareness. The slave with no education, no awareness of his or her position, no ability to read the thoughts of others, and no hope for the future is not fully a human being. The slaveholders kept the slaves uneducated because that made controlling them easier. Literate and free-thinking individuals are harder to control than a group of frightened illiterates whose only reality is that imposed by the slaveholders.

The beginning of Douglass' verbal education is not in books but in slave songs, songs which Douglass says "breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery" (58). The awareness that slavery is an abomination against God and humanity obviously leads to Douglass' awareness of his own terrible circumstances. At that point, Douglass feels the longing for freedom, although his desire is still limited by his powerlessness.

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e ardent desire to become educated. The entire evil lie of slavery and its relation to reading and writing became clear for the first time: I now understood . . . the white man's power to enslave the black man . . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom . . . Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher. I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read (78-79). Perhaps, as Douglass says, an act of Providence brought him to Baltimore and to the woman who first began teaching him to read and write, but Douglass' eventual freedom and prosperity are also the result of his own desire for education and liberty and his determination to take advantage of the opportunities as they arise. In the house in Baltimore, for example, the efforts of the mistress to teach him are ended by the master, but Douglass' desire for literacy and the freedom associated with it now in his mind drive him "to various stratagems" of self-education. The mistress not only refuses to teach him now, but she becomes dedicated to stop him from teaching himself or even from trying to read a newspaper. "That education and slavery were incompatible with each other" is ob

Category: History - F