In My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass describes how his mistress began to teach him the alphabet but was forced to stop by her husband, who convinced her that "education and slavery are incompatible with each other.”
Douglass also realized this fact as a child and resolved to learn to read and write by any means possible:
In teaching me the alphabet, in the days of her simplicity and kindness, my mistress had given me the "inch," and now, no ordinary precaution could prevent me from taking the "ell.”
In this way, Frederick Douglass suggests that education is the only way to break the chains of slavery. An educated man is free from ignorance and cannot be enslaved, so slaves should strive to get educated by any means possible.
