EDUCATION AND RELIGION

EDUCATION AND RELIGION ARE TOGETHER LINKED IN FREEDOM As early as 1841, Missouri passed a law outlawing black preachers and the teaching of literacy and (numeracy) to black people, slave of free . At least one African American preacher, Hiram Rhodes Revel, a future United States Senator from Mississippi, was jailed for months in 1854, for preaching and teaching gospel literacy to his African Methodist Episcopal Church flock in Independence, Missouri. Wikipedia says of him: "In 1845 Revels was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME); he served as a preacher and religious teacher throughout the Midwest: in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kansas.[3] "At times, I met with a great deal of opposition," he later recalled. "I was imprisoned in Missouri in 1854 for preaching the gospel to Negroes, though I was never subjected to violence."[5] During these years, he voted in Ohio." The 1841 statute forbidding black literary, that prompted Rev. Hiram Rhodes Revel's arrest, also explains why another black preacher, Rev. John Berry Meacham of the African Baptist Church, that he founded, while he also owned a profitable barrel-making business in St. Louis, was forced to move his school from the church's basement onto a moored steamboat that he owned in the middle of the Mississippi River, under federal jurisdiction. One of Rev. Meacham's most famous scholars was James Milton Turner, assistant Superintendent of Education of Missouri in Reconstruction, who established black public schools in Missouri. Even before Revels or Meacham, (who died in 1854, the same year that Revels was arrested) former St. Louisan, Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, was a martyred. Lovejoy, a white abolitionist, newspaper publisher "The Alton Observer" and Princeton -educated Presbyterian minister , who was born in Maine, was shot and killed in Alton, Illinois, on November 7, 1837. At that time, his printing presses was thrown into the Mississippi River by white slaveholders for the 4th time! Lovejoy had employed an enslaved boy as copy-carrier and errand-runner , who became one of our greatest African American writers, William Wells Brown, who was also a great historian. Browns' story is every bit as fascinating as others'. There is undeniably a sinuous, if tenuous, condign continuity, between literacy, numeracy, in American history. All personal liberty in civilization's history is based upon literacy and numeracy; who would be free, to stay free, to dream , imagine, aspire, know this. It is also of greater significance that studying true religion, unfettered education to all people are the true sources or foundations of freedom in mankind and of derivative divine power, knowledge, love, law, to all.