Frederick Douglass :: essays research papers

Frederick Douglass once said, "there can be no freedom without education." I believe this statement is true. During hard workerry, slaves were kept illiterate so they would not bob up and become free. Many slaves were stripped from their families at an early age so they would bedevil no sense of compassion towards family members. Some slaves escaped the vicious and harsh life of slavery, most who were uneducated. But can there be any real freedom without education?     Freedom is something many slaves never had the opportunity to witness. They were simply uneducated, illiterate machines who did whatever they were told. But few well-off slaves were given the gift to be educated by someone. One of these flushed persons was named Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born a slave. He never had the chance of knowing his commence. As mentioned before, slaves were stripped from their families, leaving them no sense of compassion. In the disc, The Narrative o f the action of Frederick Douglass, Douglass says, "Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much of the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger."(2) Douglass secretly met with his mother about 4 times during his whole life. He said he never really got to know her being he was only a child and the never had much of a conversation. These sorts of incidents happened to slaves throughout America and for good scarred most slaves and their families.      Slave owners not only broke slave families up, but they also attempt to keep all the slaves illiterate. In the book slave owners thought, "A nigra should know nothing but to adjust his master-to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach a slave how to read, they would become unmangeable and have no value to his master." Ma sters thought that if a slave became literate therefore they would rebel and get other slaves to follow them. Also masters lie to slaves saying learning would do them no good, only harm them. They tried using that reverse psychology to make it seem like what they were doing was right.