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Frederick Douglass Lessons Learned

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In the book “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” the author, Frederick Douglass, expresses the idea that slaves were to kept ignorant by their masters in order to keep them fit for a slave. In the 1800s, slaves were humans mostly African Americans, that were forced to do hard labor with no benefits. Slaves had little to eat or none at all as well as no clothes. They were treated as animals with no respect. Their masters would say to not give them any information of their childhood whatsoever. For this reason many slaves didn’t know when or where they were born or who were their parents at birth because they would get separated. I believe slaves were kept ignorant of such information because their masters would not want to them to …show more content…

It wasn 't that the slaves just didn’t want to tell them because they 'll ask for more, if they told them then they would learn. If a slave knew about the world and their differences, then it would make them think critically of everything. They would start to realize how they could make changes or they could plan out an escaped to get out of slavery and into freedom. If a master found out a slave knew how to learn or write, the slave would be severely punished. As mentioned in the book, it says how Mrs. Auld was teaching him when a master walked in and said no. It said the following, “Mrs. Auld kindly taught me the A, B, C. Mr. Auld found out what was happening and said it was awful and unsafe to teach a slave how to read. It will make a slave unfit to be a slave”. During the time Mr. Auld had said that, Frederick started to think, if he doesn’t want him to have it, then he will do whatever it takes to get it. And so he started working harder for it and he would run away and look for an education which was challenging but eventually found one by reading books. It was no crime if a slave was beaten to death or killed for running away. It was a crime for letting slaves learn how to read and write which didn’t hurt anyone in any way. Learning how to do those two things would benefit slaves in many ways but the masters wanted nothing but cruelty to slaves. There were some free African americans during these times and they learned to read and write. Once Frederick learned how to read and write, he realized he could now do something about slavery unlike those who didn’t know how to read or

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