Anti-literacy laws in the United States

[6] South Carolina passed the first law which prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, punishable by a fine of 100 pounds and six months in prison, via an amendment to its 1739 Negro Act.

For example, South Carolina's James H. Hammond, an ardent pro-slavery ideologue, wrote in a letter written in 1845 to the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson: "I can tell you.

If the slave is not allowed to read his bible, the sin rests upon the abolitionists; for they stand prepared to furnish him with a key to it, which would make it, not a book of hope, and love, and peace, but of despair, hatred and blood; which would convert the reader, not into a Christian, but a demon.

"[13] In North Carolina, black people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine, jail time, or both.

[14] AME Bishop William Henry Heard remembered from his enslaved childhood in Georgia that any slave caught writing "suffered the penalty of having his forefinger cut from his right hand."

[15][16] An attempt in 1831 to open a college for black students in New Haven, Connecticut was met with such overwhelming local resistance that the project was almost immediately abandoned (see Simeon Jocelyn).

[16] Once, finding us all three busily writing, Violet stood for some moments silently watching the mysterious motion of our pens, and then, in a tone of deepest sadness, said: "O!

[20] 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.

[22] A runaway slave ad published in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1845 complained, "[Fanny] can read and write, and so forge passes for herself.

[8] John Hope Franklin says that despite the laws, schools for enslaved Black students existed throughout the South, including in Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia.

[3] In Norfolk, Virginia, the anti-literacy law was not abolished until after the Civil War, in 1867, as a result of black residents petitioning the federal government to end it.