Be Educated or Be Controlled: What Frederick Douglass Knew -- & Why Attacks on Education Should Terrify You

Five years ago, I learned what Juneteenth was for the first time. I was a grown woman with a college degree, a teaching license, and three children. Somehow, I had made it through school and through most of life without ever being told about the day the last enslaved people in Texas learned they were free.

That oversight wasn’t an accident.

The Day Frederick Douglass Became Dangerous

Frederick Douglass wrote about the moment he realized exactly why slaveholders feared education. He was a child, still enslaved, when his mistress began to teach him the alphabet. Her husband stopped her cold.

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in Maryland in 1818. He taught himself to read and write, escaped, and became one of the most powerful American voices for abolition, education, and justice across history.

“If you teach that n****r how to read, there would be no keeping him, " the slaveholder said.

“It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

That’s the moment Douglass saw the truth: Literacy is a threat to any system built on domination. Knowledge makes a person unfit to be controlled.

He taught himself in secret. He challenged local boys to spelling contests so he could learn new words. He devoured The Columbian Orator, which introduced him to speeches about liberty, justice, and resistance. The more he read, the more clearly he saw the injustice—and the lies—that surrounded him.

Douglass didn’t calm down, he got angrier, and he got focused. Education made him both smart and dangerous.

What The Ruling Class Doesn't Want You to Learn

Today, we’re seeing books pulled from classrooms. Today, the federal government is rewriting and whitewashing history - defunding libraries - turning words like equity, diversity, and critical thinking into political targets.

And I keep hearing that sinister echo through time: "If you teach [them] to read . . . there will be no keeping them.”

Here’s the truth:

• People who read critically are harder to manipulate.

• People who understand systems are harder to exploit.

• People who can name injustice are more likely to rise against it.

  
  

That’s why I lived 45 years in this country before I learned about Juneteenth.

That’s why the control class doesn't want kids reading about slavery, gender, protest, or power.

That’s why words like liberate, resist, and reimagine get erased from the curriculum.

Because when you control the language, you control the thinking.

This Fight is About More Test Scores or Teacher Contracts

This fight is about who gets to know what, and who decides.

True love of country is using your voice, your pen, and your actions to expand liberty for everyone. These heroic Americans did just that.

The current occupant of the White House says, "They're teaching children to hate America."

That's a baloney sandwich, and you know it.

True love of country isn't fragile. American students aren't infants who need to be spoon-fed lies because the truth hurts their tummies.

Unless you're raising them to be compliant. Of service to the Ruling Class.

If Douglass were alive today, he’d fight for a new generation of Americans to grow up with access to history, to dissent, to real vocabulary because instead, we are making them easier to enslave again. Maybe not in chains (unless they're kidnapped and shipped to El Salvador). But enslaved in silence. In confusion. In hardship. In apathy.

Stay Literate. Stay Free.

There’s a reason I love to teach vocabulary. It’s not just about “big words,” it’s about big thinking, bigger questions, and a life that cannot be narrowed or owned. That is my wish for every young person who passes through my classroom.

Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

Freedom is knowing how to name what’s happening. It means understanding the system you're in. It means reading the signs and saying out loud:

That’s not truth.

That’s not justice.

I am America, and that’s not what I was born for.

I'll be there by your side with this clear and unwavering message:

Attacks on education are attacks on your freedom.

And the best way to fight back is to read. To teach. To speak. To question.

To stay forever unfit for slavery of any kind.