Excerpt from The Liberator

Slaveholders prevented slaves from learning how to read and write because they wanted to obstruct their access to the barrage of abolitionist literature flooding the South. Despite their best efforts, the following extract from The Liberator demonstrates the enslaved population’s resilience to the anti-literacy laws imposed by the slaveholders. In this particular account, the commentator describes a group of free and enslaved African Americans reading Freedom’s Journal, a black-operated newspaper of New York. 

A few years since, being in a slave state, I chanced one morning, very early, to look through the curtains of my chamber window, which opened upon a back yard. I saw a mulatto with a newspaper in his hand, surrounded by a score of colored men, who were listening, open mouthed, to a very inflammatory article the yellow man was reading. Sometimes the reader dwelt emphatically on particular passages, and I could see his auditors stamp and clench their hands. I afterwards learned that the paper was published in New-York, and addressed to the blacks. It is but reasonable to suppose that such scenes are of common occurrence in the slave states, and it does not require the wisdom of Solomon to discern their tendency