Southern States Criminalize Black Literacy as Slavery Hardens

From the 1790s onward, Southern states progressively criminalized the teaching of enslaved — and in some cases free Black — people to read and write. Georgia banned teaching enslaved people to read in 1770 and strengthened this after Gabriel's Rebellion. Virginia, the Carolinas, and later Gulf states followed. The rationale was explicit: literacy enabled enslaved people to forge passes, read abolitionist literature, and organize resistance. Enslaved people who learned to read did so clandestinely, often at great personal risk. These laws also denied enslaved people access to the Bible — ironically given slaveholders' use of scripture to justify bondage. Frederick Douglass later wrote that his enslaver's prohibition on his reading confirmed to him that literacy was the path to freedom.