Black to the Future

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Following the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina, the largest uprising of slaves in the colonies before the American Revolution, legislators there responded by banishing two forms of literacy crucial to the slaves: the mastery of letters, and the mastery of talking drums. Both forms of literacy had been pivotal to the slave's capacity to rebel.

For the next century and a half, access to literacy, then, became for the slaves a hallmark of their humanity and a tool to their own liberation, a liberation of the spirit as well as the body. The relation between freedom and literacy became the compelling theme of the slave narratives, the great body of printed books that ex-slaves generated to pronounce their common humanity with white Americans and to indict the system that had oppressed them. In the century and a third since the abolition of slavery, the possession of literacy—mastering the master's tools to dismantle, or reconstruct, the master's house—has been a cardinal value of the African-American tradition. It is no accident that the first great victory in the legal battle over segregation was fought on the grounds of education, of equal access to literacy.

Today, however, blacks are facing a new form of denial to the tools of literacy, this time in the guise of access to the digital-knowledge economy. And while the dilemma that our ancestors so passionately confronted was imposed by others, this form of cyber-segregation is, to...