On August 21, 1831, the enslaved Virginian Nat Turner led a bloody revolt, which changed the course of American history. The Southampton Uprising killed approximately 55 white people, leading to the execution of some 55 black people and the beatings of hundreds of others by white crowds.
While the rebellion lasted only about 24 hours, it sparked a new wave of oppressive laws prohibiting the movement, assembly and education of enslaved people.
At the same time, abolitionists saw an opening for the argument that the slavery system was untenable. Virginia lawmakers argued over the way forward. A vote to free the slaves through progressive emancipation won the support of state leaders. “It was a legitimate debate,” says Patrick Breen, author of The Earth Will Be Flooded With Blood: A New Story Of Nat Turner’s Revolt. It was “not obvious that it was not going to pass”.
Nat Turner (1800-1831) accosted in the forest by a man in search of black people in search of freedom.
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In the end, however, Virginia and other southern states chose to keep slavery in place and tighten control over the lives of African Americans, including their literacy. In the pre-war South, it is estimated that only 10% of slaves were literate. For many slavers, even this rate was too high. As Clarence Lusane, professor of political science at Howard University, notes, there was a growing belief that “an enslaved educated person was a dangerous person.”
The revolt of 1831 confirms this point of view which has been gaining momentum for years. Turner was a passionate preacher guided by spiritual visions. Her ability to read the Bible allowed her to find stories of divine support for the fight against injustice, says Sarah Roth, professor of history at Meredith College and creator of the Nat Turner project.
Slavers and their clergy controlled the biblical narrative among the illiterate enslaved, but educated American blacks, like Turner, saw beyond this “sanitized” version, which did not question slavery.
Abolitionists wave by written word
African American literacy was not only problematic for slavers because of the potential to illuminate biblical readings. “Anti-literacy laws have been drafted in response to the rise of abolitionism in the north,” says Breen. One of the most threatening abolitionists of the time was the black neo-English speaker David Walker. From 1829 to 1830, he distributed the Charm, a pamphlet calling for uprisings to end slavery. Black sailors brought the text of Walker, surreptitiously sewn into the seams of the clothes, to the south.
Nat Turner’s Bible on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., 2017.
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There is no evidence that Turner himself read the Charm and inspired by it, according to Edward Rugemer, professor of history at Yale University. However, there is “a lot of evidence that abolitionist writings directly influenced” the Caribbean uprisings at that time, he notes. If “written abolitionist turmoil shaped the nature of slave resistance” on the islands, American slavers believed it could influence enslaved populations in the United States.
To add to these fears, the abolitionist newspaper of William Lloyd Garrison, The liberator, which began publishing on January 1, 1831. Although it was edited by Garrison, who was described as a “radical” white abolitionist, Rugemer contends that it was widely regarded as a “black newspaper” because the most of his readers were African-Americans, as were “a few radical whites who believed in slavery and anti-racism”. Slavers in the South saw this article as another example of outside agitation disseminated by the written word.
Literacy Threatens Justification for Slavery
Black American literacy also threatened a major justification for slavery – that blacks were “less than human, permanent illiterate and dumb,” says Lusane. “This is refuted when African Americans were educated, and undermines the logic of the system.”
States struggling to maintain slavery began to tighten literacy laws in the early 1830s. In April 1831, Virginia declared that any meeting to teach free African-Americans to read or write was illegal. New codes also prohibited teaching slaves.
Other southern states passed equally stringent anti-literacy laws around this time. In 1833, an Alabama law stated that “any person or persons who attempt to teach a free person of color or a slave, to spell, read or write, shall, if convicted, be condemned to a fine of at least two hundred and fifty dollars. “(The fine would amount to approximately $ 7,600 in today’s dollars.)
Despite the consequences, many people enslaved continued to learn to read. And many slavers may have supported this. Many people enslaved were doing “sophisticated work, including operations management,” which required literacy, says Rugemer. Banning black Americans from reading and writing was not a practical strategy for anyone.
And it was too late.
Schools After the Civil War
Anti-slavery ideas had already spread, largely by the written word. As Roth points out, “Literacy promotes thinking and elevates awareness. It helps you break out of your own cultural constraints and think of things from a totally different perspective. ”
Liberated from black people learning to read with white teachers at school around 1860.
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The view that slavery was wrong and should be abolished was reinforced by written texts. Shortly after Turner’s rebellion in 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “will be, from now on, and forever free.”
When American army units began arriving in Virginia in 1861, members of the liberated black community quickly began to open schools for African Americans, staffed by black teachers and white people from the North. After the end of the Civil War, literacy rates rose steadily among black Americans, from 20% in 1870 to almost 70% in 1910, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.
