Summary Of Learning To Read And Write By Frederick Douglass

In “Learning to Read and Write” by Fredrick Douglass, Douglass went through many obstacles to learn to read and write. He was living with the Hugh family for quite some time about seven years. Douglass’s first learned the alphabet from his mistress. Douglass goes on about how his mistress is so kind and nice to him even though she eventually converted to her husband practices and dehumanized him. According to Douglass, he says, “She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task as treating me as though I were a brute.” (100) His mistress eventually established that slavery and education were unsuited for one another. (101) Douglass could no longer be seen reading a book at the Hugh family house because it would be taken

Douglass befriended all the little white boys and transformed them into educators. (101) Soon enough, he learned how to read. Douglass started reading the “The Columbian Orator”, which taught him more about slavery in result made him hate his enslavers. Douglass states, “I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.” (103) Learning to read was also a curse for Douglass because he began learning things about slavery that made him angry. After, Douglass learned horrible information about slavery, he wanted to know more. That’s when he stumbled across the word “abolitionist.” Douglass didn’t quite know what the word abolition meant but he knew it was always used in a positive way for slaves. For example, if a slave escaped to freedom. Douglass grew an interest for the words abolition and abolitionist after he fully grasped the meaning of the words and was set on learning more about