![]() ![]() These individuals were vividly aware of the general perception, especially among white slaveholders in the South, that black literacy and education posed a significant threat to the future of the slave system and to maintaining black subordination generally. Embracing the Enlightenment stress on the importance of the life of the mind, they turned to reading as an invaluable method of acquiring knowledge, and to writing as a means of asserting identity, recording information, and communicating with a black public that ranged from the literate to the semiliterate to the illiterate. "Dreaded Eloquence" THE ORIGINS AND RISE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY SOCIETIES In the late 1820s and early 1830s, free blacks in the urban North formed literary societies as a place in which to read and experiment with rhetorical strategies. ![]()
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