Medium: Brushed Acrylic on 16x20 Stretched Canvas
On September 9, 1739 in the British colony of South Carolina
along the Soto River, a literate slave abducted from the Kingdom of Kongo, called Jemmy Cato, led 20 other enslaved Kongolese men on the largest slave revolt in British colonial history. Branded as the "Soto Rebellion", the slaves had all been former soldiers. All being literate, they were able to communicate with each other through reading and writing, thus keeping the revolt a secret and making an organized rebellion possible. After a substantial loss of life on both sides the rebellion was eventually suppressed.
Pursuant to the "Soto Rebellion", the legislators of the South Carolina Colony passed the Negro Act of 1740. Laws were inacted, in part, to restrict and ban the education of all slaves in the colony. Mirroring the anxieties of South Carolina, in 1755 the colony of Georgia inacted similar legislation banning the teaching of slaves to write and restricting reading to biblical text only. Similar laws banning the education of slaves spread throughout the 13 British colonies and remained in place even after America gained its independence from Great Britain.
Realizing that these laws constituted a gross injustice, whenever the opportunty allowed, risking severe coporal punsihment or hefty monetary fines, literate slaves, freed blacks and sympathetic whites continued to bring education to the slave populations, often under the cover of darkness.
Written by Carl G. Brown
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