Reading as a Subversive Act: Libraries as the Guide to Liberation
By Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B.
Copyright, Catholic Library Association; Catholic Library World 78:4 (June 2008), 302-305.
Reprinted with permission.
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When one reads the narrative accounts of slaves in these interviews, one frequently hears that one learned how to read because white children taught them. Marshall Mack grew up a slave in Bedford County in Virginia. He explained that his Uncle John was a carpenter who used to take the children of the mistress to school in a "two-horse surrey." He wrote that "on such trips, the chillun learned my uncle to read and write." He added that they could have had trouble "for it was a law among slave-holders that a slave not be caught wid a book."⁴ The penalty was a terrible whipping. Most of the accounts reveal the ever-constant experience of the terrible whipping meted out to slaves, male and female. Doc Daniel Dowdy was born in Georgia in 1856. He learned very young that the white man, no matter how young, was to be called master. He wrote: "the first time you was caught trying to read or write, you was whipped with a cow-hide, the next time with a cat-o-nine tails, and the third time they cut the first jint (sic) offen your forefinger." At the same time you received thirty-nine lashes. Daniel Dowdy went on to point out two slave preachers who were found by the patrollers; and, although they had a pass, they found two letters addressed to them. Taken to the slave-holders, he was asked whether he knew that the two slaves, who were brothers, knew how to read and write. Called by the owner, one was afraid and denied being able to read and write. The other said "yes sir." And then pointed out that his brother was even better able to read and write than he. The owner - "because of their spunk" - told the patrollers to leave them alone.⁵

Slavery in the United States was especially brutal and demeaning. A slave had no rights. He or she was totally under the power of the slave owner. As a result, slave society was a violent society. Slavery demanded coercion and total control. There was the constant fear of revolt or escape. With the division between slave states and free states, war was seemingly inevitable. The slave population was an ever-increasing threat. It was imperative that this slave population be maintained in ignorance and under control. All books and periodicals were to be censored. Any information regarding ideas and information touching on slavery or freedom, any changing attitudes and political discussion both in the States and in Europe was carefully kept from slaves. As a result any notion of freedom or emancipation was to be absolutely concealed. Every effort was made to control and obliterate any communication or literary source outside of the South. In the antebellum South, reading was made an act of subversion; learning was an act of revolt. Sooner or later all of the southern states made teaching a slave a penal offense, subject to prison. For the slave who learned to read or write, amputation of fingers and whipping with cow hide lashes was the standard penalty. Excessive whipping could be fatal. Inasmuch as learning to read was almost always clandestine and hidden, historians lack any certain idea as to the number of slaves who were taught by others or who learned on their own in the period before the Civil War. In her recent study, When I can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South, Janet Duitsman Cornelius surmises that perhaps ten percent of the slaves had become literate before the Civil War. ⁶

Not all slave owners, however, opposed education for their slaves. George Moses Horton (1797?-1883?) was a slave in North Carolina. His owner had no objection to allowing him to learn to read and write. He was a poet and can be considered the first professional black poet in this country. Much of his poetry was published. He hoped to acquire enough money to buy his freedom. He was finally freed by Union soldiers.

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