Anti-literacy law is legislation outlawing the teaching of literacy to a group or groups of people.
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In the United States
Anti-literacy laws were in force in many slave states before and during the American Civil War regarding slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. These largely came into force following abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion and Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831.
William M. Banks wrote in Black Intellectuals:
"Literacy also threatened the control and surveillance network for slaves in the South. Concern about runaways prompted slaveholders to require passes for all slaves traveling unaccompanied off the plantation. Literate slaves, however, could forge the necessary papers and escape to the North (few white patrollers could read well enough to verify the documents). Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write. ...some slaveholders tolerated slave literacy. Others ignored the statutes for economic reasons, realizing that literate slaves could handle record keeping and business transactions, and thus increase the profits and leisure time of the planter class. The prohibitions were also ignored by pious masters who wanted their slaves to read the Bible. And there are numerous accounts of planter children enjoying "playing school" and teaching their slave playmates the rudiments of literacy."
U.S. States with anti-literacy laws
"With the exception of Maryland and Kentucky, every Southern state absolutely prohibited the education of slaves," Angela Davis wrote.
Between 1829 and 1834 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina and Virginia all passed anti-literacy laws. South Carolina prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, punishable by a fine of 100 pounds and six months in prison, via an amendment to its 1739 Negro Act.
A website titled "Fight Municipal Court Abuse (court.rchp.com) includes the following in its list of significant anti-black laws:
A 19th-century Virginia law specified: "[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes."
In North Carolina, black people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine and/or jail time.
Laws restricting the education of black students were not limited to the South; in 1833 after black and white abolitionists founded a boarding school for African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, the state legislature outlawed the instruction of 'colored students who were not inhabitants of the state', and the school was burned down shortly thereafter.
Resistance
Educators in the South found ways to both circumvent and challenge the law. John Berry Meachum, for example, moved his school out of St. Louis, Missouri when that state passed an anti-literacy law in 1847, and re-established it on a steamship on the Mississippi River, which was beyond the reach of Missouri state law. After she was arrested, tried, and served a month in prison for educating free black children in Norfolk, Virginia, Margaret Crittendon Douglas wrote a book on her experiences which helped draw national attention to the anti-literacy laws.