01-04-2025
Dangerous Learning: The Story Of The Struggle For Black Literacy
The story of the fight for Black literacy
Yale University Press
In his new book Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy, legal scholar Derek Black tells the story of the resistance to Black literacy in America. The author looks at three periods: pre-Civil War, post-Civil War, and the years of Jim Crow to the present. And as the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.
Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School. His previous book, Schoolhouse Burning, examined the growth of public education as a protected right, and this new work overlaps with much of that story, with both building the case that the growth and adoption of public education in this country is closely linked to the movement to provide education to Black Americans.
In Dangerous Learning, Black tells how successive waves of calls for teaching slaves and freedmen to read and write triggered resistance from whites in power. Literacy was seen as a major factor in pre-war slave unrest, and attempts to educate Southern Blacks were greeted with everything from suspicion to violent opposition. Even limited attempts, such as church-sponsored schools that promised to confine instruction to Biblical and religious texts were seen as a threat.
Schools for Black students often went underground, and teachers sometimes put on trial.
Northerners were seen as outside agitators, trying to spread the notion that Black literacy was a good idea. Teachers were increasingly seen as the enemy. Schools for Black students often went underground, and teachers sometimes put on trial. Southern authorities tried to clamp down on mailers from the North that promoted such ideas. Censorship was increasingly a tool, as Southern politicians believed that 'their way of life depended on blockading the South against antislavery ideas, rhetoric, and literature.' Antislavery and literacy ideas were not even to be discussed, their existence not acknowledged.
Black describes the pre-war South as enclosed in a propaganda bubble, a steady media diet that told a story only from the enslavers' point of view.
The machine fed the Southern identity a poisonous diet for three decades. And once the slavocracy was speaking only to itself, the capacity to sort fact from fiction, reason from sophistry, policy preference from constitutional principle, disappeared.
Reconstruction saw a change, and the rise of the idea that, as Senator Oliver Morton put it, 'Republican government may go on for a while with half the voters unable to read or write, but it cannot long continue.'
The states could, and did, drag their heels and find creative ways to segregate, but as W.E.B. DuBois wrote in Black Reconstruction, 'The first great movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes.'
Schools drew white rancor during Reconstruction. Black cites one scholar who found evidence of 631 attacks on Black schools during the period. There was also resistance to legislation and policy. Publications like Georgia's Weekly Examiner argued that if white people had to pay taxes to educate Black people, 'the extraction of white wealth for benefit of Black people would never stop.' Taxpayer funded Black education, writes the author, 'was the wedge with which these papers tried to turn voters against the new state constitutions.' It was, white leaders charged, a diet of 'social engineering' indoctrination of children.
When the election compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, opponents of Black literacy took center stage, and Southerners leveled arguments still heard today. Mississippi Governor James Vardaman told the legislature to stop 'wasting' money taken from 'toiling white men and women' to spend on the 'vain purpose' of educating Black children.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her regular post for March 30, notes a similar procession of this complaint. In 1871, she argues, former Confederates began maintaining that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds.
What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant 'socialism' that would destroy the United States.
Other authorities zeroed in on the books that students would use, making sure that Southern students learned about a war that was the North's fault; the peace-loving South has been a home where 'slaves were not ill-treated.'
Black concludes that the anti-Black literacy movement post-Reconstruction would be a long one, and that even the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education would be 'a sad testament to how hard old habits are to break.'
The book provides a strong, narrative history that focuses on the work of the men and women who pursued Black literacy. It's a powerful read that challenges the reader to understand that our country's past is not nearly as far past as we might wish, with our current culture wars carrying echoes of this earlier struggle. It's a lively and engaging read, a series of stories that brings critical episodes of our country to life, full of both hope for achieving the best promises of America and disappointment for the deliberate attempts to cut those promises short.
