The First Department of Education

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. For he who knoweth his master's will and doeth it not shall be beat with many stripes. You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection. In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind. Hold me as I stand in the heavens. I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my burden. We determined to enter the house secretly. Hart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window entered and came downstairs. I unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. What you just heard was written in a pamphlet called The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was written by a white lawyer days before Turner's execution for the crime of insurrection. While scholars have debated its accuracy, what is known for sure is that over the course of an August night in 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt of enslaved Black people that ended in the killing of at least 55 white men, women, and children. It was something that white slave owners had always feared. And in its wake, slave holding states zeroed in on one major culprit, literacy. Nat Turner knew how to read. He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault against whites in Virginia. The manner in which I learned to read and write not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease. Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read, but he managed to learn anyway. He read the Bible, and he believed he was a prophet who would free his people. I surely would be a prophet. The South as a region saw education as a dangerous thing. The black population was the majority population in a handful of states. Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina. Alabama was nearly 50%. Florida was nearly 50%. The ultimate means of social control is to make sure they don't have a lot of knowledge. After Nat Turner's rebellion, most of the slave holding states passed or expanded laws to prevent enslaved people from learning to read and write. Every Southern state had some anti literacy or anti assemblage law, which really forbade African Americans from going to school. And that was a mechanism to control for slavery. The last thing you want is enslaved people finding just a little bit of free time to sit around, use their …