Bread for lessons: how Frederick Douglass learned to read

Around 1826, Frederick, about eight years old, was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia began teaching him the alphabet, until her husband stopped her. Teaching a slave to read, he said, would make him unfit to be a slave.

Douglass later wrote that this was the moment he understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. If reading was what his enslavers feared most, it was what he wanted most.

He made friends with poor white boys in the neighbourhood. He always carried a book, and bread, which he had plenty of while many of them went hungry. He traded the bread for lessons, and they taught him letters and words on the street.

With money he earned, he bought The Columbian Orator, a book of famous speeches, and read it over and over. Its arguments about freedom gave him words for what he felt. Years later Douglass became one of the greatest speakers of the nineteenth century.