In the excerpt from Fredrick Douglass's autobiography, it focuses primarily on how education is important and ignorance or the lack of knowledge is the state of being passive because, you do not possess the skills to criticize or comment on ideas you do not fully understand; we see this in passages such as "Shutting me up in mental darkness.", as ignorance and "The silver trump of freedom had aroused my soul to eternal wakefulness." as knowledge. .
The desire to go and continue my education was my way of feeding my hunger for knowledge. I too lacked the skills to defend myself and fight for more "freedom" in pursuit of my happiness doing something other than physical labor at work which many people must sacrifice in doing so when lacking education. Two different causes of course, but with the same purpose. Fortunately times are different but, education or being informed remains just as important today as it did then, for whatever reasons that may be.
If you think or express yourself differently, and the attempt or effort is not made from the receiver to comprehend your point of view, your intentions, motivations and in some cases, even religious beliefs are questioned as seen in Wright's autobiography in his fight to conquer knowledge versus ignorance in passages such as: "Why?", "Who told you to do it?", "Then why did you do it?" , " That's the Devil's work." or "Then it's a lie.".
When confronted with these differences of opinion, people tend to be frightened with the unknown, unexplainable or what they don't comprehend. I too have been misunderstood and misinterpreted when one of the forms I chose to express myself, was through what I wore. You shouldn't pass judgment on what you see and do not understand, until you come to know the person and their way of thinking. Levels of education are not reflected on someone's appearance. In my opinion a lot of the geniuses of our time were also misjudged for their differences such as Galileo, Mozart, and Columbus just to name a few.