Anti-literacy laws in the United States

The first anti-literacy law was passed by the legislature of the colony of South Carolina in 1740. Enacted in response to the 1739 Stono Rebellion, it prohibited enslaved people from learning to write and restricted their ability to read to prevent an organized slave rebellion. Southern slave states enacted anti-literacy laws between 1740 and 1834, and the United States is the only country known to have had anti-literacy laws.

State anti-literacy laws

Between 1740 and 1834, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Virginia all passed anti-literacy laws. South Carolina passed the first law which prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, punishable by a fine of £100 and six months in prison, via an amendment to its 1740 Negro Act.

Some slaveowners blamed abolitionists for the supposed need for anti-literacy laws. 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. It was the abolition agitation. 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. [...] Allow our slaves to read your writings, stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such unspeakable fools?"

Significant anti-black laws include:

• 1829, Georgia: Prohibited teaching blacks to read, punished by fine and imprisonment
• 1830, Louisiana: passed laws punishing anyone teaching blacks to read with fines, imprisonment or floggings
• 1830, North Carolina: passed laws punishing anyone teaching slaves reading or writing with fines or flogging
• 1832, Alabama and Virginia: Prohibited whites from teaching blacks to read or write, punished by fines and floggings
• 1833, Georgia: Prohibited blacks from working in reading or writing jobs (via an employment law), and prohibited teaching blacks, punished by fines and whippings (via an anti-literacy law)
• 1847, Missouri: Prohibited assembling or teaching slaves to read or write

Mississippi state law required a white person to serve up to a year in prison as "penalty for teaching a slave to read".

A 19th-century Virginia law specified: "[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes."

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

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". Other formerly enslaved people had similar memories of disfigurement and severe punishments for reading and writing.

Arkansas, Kentucky, Maryland and Tennessee were the only slave states that did not enact a legal prohibition on educating slaves.

It is estimated that only 5% to 10% of enslaved African Americans became literate, to some degree, before the American Civil War.

Restrictions on the education of black students were not limited to the South. While teaching blacks in the North was not illegal, many Northern states, counties, and cities barred black students from public schools. Until 1869, only whites could attend public schools in Indiana and Illinois. Ohio excluded black children from public schools until 1849, when it allowed separate schools for black students. Public schools were also almost entirely segregated in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Only Massachusetts had de-segregated public schools before the Civil War (it barred segregation in public schools in 1855). 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). Private schools that attempted to educate black and white students together, often opened by abolitionists, were destroyed by mobs, as in the case of Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire and the Quaker Prudence Crandall's Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut. After the Civil War, most Northern states legally prohibited segregation in public schools, although it often continued in practice, including through racially gerrymandered boundaries of school districts, until the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education found this unconstitutional.

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! dat be great comfort, Missis. You can write to your friends all 'bout ebery ting, and so hab dem write to you. Our people can't do so. Wheder dey be 'live or dead, we can't neber know—only sometimes we hears dey be dead."

— A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 375