29/11/2025
SCI ADVENTURES IN AFRICA EXPOSING A RACIST LIE THAT MANY HAVE COME TO BELIEVE UNFORTUNATELY.
The saying “If you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book” is a racist lie created by enslavers and segregationists to justify Black oppression.
Enslavers spread this lie for one to disguise the reality that Black people were risking their lives to read, write, teach, and learn. This is why literacy was criminalized as a result of Blacks literally risking limb and life to gain access to literacy, books and reading.
Here is a question we must ask: “If Black people were “not apt to read” then why did slave states pass laws making literacy punishable by whipping, exile or banishment,imprisonment, mutilation, or death?
The answer: “You don’t outlaw what people aren’t doing. You outlaw what terrifies you.
And enslavers were terrified of Black literacy because they knew that literacy led to communication and organizing; and organizing led to rebellion and freedom.
In truth enslaved Black people risked limb and life to gain access to books. Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries stole books, taught each other in secret, and learned from sympathetic whites. They hid spelling primers in quilts, traded food for lessons, and built clandestine “pit schools” in the woods to study by lamplight.
This was not a people avoiding books. This was a people risking their lives to be literate. The “If you want to hide something…” slogan was invented to shame Black people. During Jim Crow, racist politicians, preachers, educators, and writers repeated the lie to ridicule Black intelligence, invalidate Black scholarship, and excuse the gross underfunding of Black schools. It became a weapon—a way to imply Black people were naturally disinterested in knowledge.
Yet during this same period Black literacy skyrocketed from under 10% after slavery to nearly 90% by 1910. Historically Black colleges and universities blossomed. Black newspapers, journals, authors, and scholars flourished.
Black people have always been readers, thinkers, teachers, writers, and freedom-builders—we stole books, bought books, traded for books! The opposite narrative is recycled slaveholder propaganda.