Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Once a slave, a man loses his identity, rights, and control over life. Slavery limits the opportunity of achieving self-knowledge. Lack of education and knowledge makes it even worse. The white men realized that reading could become a tool for slaves to stand for their rights. That is why, Frederick Douglass refers to “teaching” as a sin in the Christian country.
There was a time when penalty for a hate crime against a slave was as low as fifteen pounds sterling.
[tabs type=”horizontal”][tabs_head][tab_title]Olaudah Equiano[/tab_title][/tabs_head][tab]These men should be called barbarians instead of Christians.[/tab][/tabs]
According to him, slavery turned decent men into savages. Christianity allowed its worshipers to fall into hypocrisy of slavery. He perceived Christianity in two different forms, one followed by white slaveholders, and one followed by himself which he considered to be the true form. When Christians allowed greed and lust to spread throughout their hearts, how could they let the slaves to read?
Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, took almost a decade to finally raise her voice against slavery. She helped support the anti-slavery reading room and raised money to educate people. Before that, she had very similar life experiences as mentioned earlier. She was sent away for hard labor and sexually abused until she dared to talk about sexual exploitation under slavery.
What is common between the efforts carried out by these people is how important it is to educate one’s self. The importance and influence education has, cannot be denied. It is the key to the door of freedom. The moment when Douglas was forcefully stopped from learning, he had seen this connection between learning and freedom and how it was the thing feared most by slaveholders.
