2: African American Educational Activism in St. Louis, 1865

On February 16, 1847, the Missouri State legislature enacted a law that prohibited slaves, Negroes, and mulattoes from learning to read and write; an attempt to prevent the formal education of slaves in Missouri. The law also forbade the migration of free Blacks to the state. Jeffrey C. Stone has reported that many slave owners in Central Missouri believed that “they were morally obligated to instruct their slaves to read and write, and did so without regard to the law.” Stone determined that slave owners in central Missouri assumed they had the right to control and direct their slaves’ lives without government interference (Stone, 2006, p. 38).