FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND READING

It has often been said that knowledge is power and in order to get knowledge one must be as equipped as possible to obtain it, and in not only today’s world but that of Frederick Douglass, reading is the most fundamental tool necessary. To show just how important this concept of knowledge as power was, consider how far Douglass’s owners went to demonstrate as he wrote, “education and slavery were incompatible with others.” One of the basic tenets of slavery was that you don’t teach the slaves to read or write. His mistress originally violated that tenet, seeing Douglass as just a young child, but as he started to mature, she immediate realized the danger of a slave that understood what was going on and could read material that wasn’t controlled by them. Douglass writes “nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger.” And of course, she was right, because it was through reading that he discovered abolition and the existence of abolitionist.
You can see the immediate impact that had as before Douglass realized that there were outside forces that did not belie...