Professor Derek W. Black of the University of South Carolina School of Law has written a gem of a book with his latest, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.
Black, a leading academic in the field of equal education, has been writing sharply on the issue of African Americans and education for years. (Full disclosure: At one point, Black and I taught at Howard University School of Law at the same time.)
Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy
By Derek W. Black
Yale University Press, 352 pages
Release date: January 14, 2025
Black’s new book arrives at the right time. In the age of MAGA and Donald Trump, racism in every aspect of American society is hailed as a virtue. People are unabashedly bigoted, including Republican governors and legislators. Black’s book provides the origins of their thinking and their policy, and exposes it as nothing new.
Black takes the reader back to the days of “slave revolts,” which “triggered a war on Black literacy” that engulfed “the entire South.” The connections to recent policy decisions are obvious. Back in the nineteenth century, white Southerners believed that literacy and education had led to the insurrections of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, and such lenient social policy had to be curtailed.
Specifically, Black devotes time here to Vesey’s planned attack on slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 (Black calls the moment “The Spark”), and to Nat Turner’s bloody revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 (Black calls it “The Fire”). These two revolts, along with David Walker’s literary revolt, a pamphlet called Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, form the core of Black’s historical thesis.
He describes Turner’s historical moment as “a shot of post-traumatic stress” for the Southern states. It was, according to Black, “a fight for survival” for many of the Southern states, and a conscious decision “to die” in a “civil war a generation later” to sustain the institution of African slavery in America. The entire book is a back-and-forth of this conflict.
Back in the mid-nineteenth century, many of the Northern states were abolishing slavery, while the South was fighting to maintain it, complete with laws to perpetuate a system of educational apartheid. Walker’s Appeal, for example, was banned in Southern states, and anyone found in possession of it could be arrested. “Private bounties” were offered to anyone who would kill Walker, and though no one knows how he died, Walker was dead one year after Appeal was published.
Yale University Press
Other strong actions were taken by the Southern states to stop African Americans from receiving basic human developmental skills. The chapter titles of the book reflect the oppressive life for Black people in the South regarding literacy. One chapter on the full-scale assault on Black literacy is called “Blockade.” Another chapter, in which the South accelerates its actions more forcefully, is titled “Southern Propaganda.” A chapter on Southern efforts to impose its ideology on Northern states is titled “The Tragedy of Silence.”
Dangerous Learning covers proactive and reactive efforts to offset the actions of the Southern states. African Americans such as Daniel Payne, Susie King Taylor, and Frederick Douglass kept the light of education and reading glowing brightly during difficult times. Anti-slavery forces in the North matched the viciousness of the Southern states with their activism and by constantly flooding the South with anti-slavery pamphlets and literature.
Appropriately, Black ends the book with a chapter on efforts today at censorship and repression to prevent the next generation from learning the evil truth about the South and slavery in America. While the tactics against education, and Black education in particular, have changed, Black suggests that, like during the post-Civil War period, the South “once again won the war” that was waged during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The good news is that the fight to stop this racist backlash against equal justice for African Americans in education continues. The goal of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuits was always equal education. While the ruling in that case achieved many great things, it has not yet delivered on that goal. Black’s book will make many see that the battle must be waged with far more vigor and confrontation.