Frederick Douglass · Politics
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery with a weapon he stole one letter at a time - literacy. His <em>Narrative</em> (1845) traces a single revolutionary idea: that a master’s power rested on keeping the enslaved ignorant, and that to learn to read was already to begin to be free.
You learned that Douglass identified literacy as the thing slavery most feared. In your own words, why would teaching a slave to read ‘forever unfit him to be a slave’?
Leads to Mary Wollstonecraft.
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