The push for universal public education across the United States began in the midst of the Civil War — on the Union-occupied Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. There, thousands of Black children began going to schools built expressly for them, where they learned to read and write after decades of being denied the right of literacy.
The Sea Islands’ experiment, as it was known, marked a positive moment in the fraught history of Black education, notes education law expert Derek W. Black in his new book, “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”
“A generation of Black leaders rose from these communities in the years following the War to demand that the South do right by all its people,” writes Black, director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of South Carolina. In doing so, they “changed life’s possibilities for all the South’s children, Black and white.”
But bad habits die hard. In “Dangerous Learning,” Black explores policies designed to suppress education among Black Americans in the antebellum South and how the legacy of those policies, from book bans to anti-DEI directives, continues to taint public education today.
Beginning in 1820s Charleston, South Carolina, he traces the paranoia against literacy that rippled through the halls of Southern power in the wake of slave uprisings led by Denmark Vesey and, later, Nat Turner, men who read widely and encouraged their peers to do the same.
This paranoia led to restrictive laws such as the Negro Seaman Act, which jailed Black sailors at port under the false pretense that they were spreading “the contagion” of abolitionist literature, and edicts that criminalized reading.
These anti-literacy policies conveyed a message opposite of their intent: They convinced Black Americans of the power of the written word and made them more determined than ever to learn.
Black goes on to show that through the stuttering advance toward equality in the South over the next two centuries — through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement — the unwavering belief of Black Americans in the promise of education for all remained strong.
America needs that same fealty to public education today, he writes, when “the rising paranoia over critical race theory, curricular transparency, ‘socialist’ teachers, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in public schools strikingly resembles the South’s paranoia over Northern textbooks, Northern teachers, Northern universities, and Northern popular literature in the decades before the Civil War.”
In this interview with EdSurge, Black discusses “Dangerous Learning,” how challenges to traditional public school education enforce rather than dissolve political divisions, and the unexpected successes hidden in the sad history of anti-literacy.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: You link some of the fiercest anti-literacy policies in the South to three very strong, charismatic Black men: Denmark Vesey, a freedman in Charleston, David Walker, an abolitionist writer in Boston, and Nat Turner, an enslaved man. Can you talk about their influence and impact?
Derek W. Black: I think the conventional narrative that most people hear is that Black literacy was always criminalized in the South during slavery or that all enslaved people were forbidden from reading. And that’s just not true. There were lots of schools operating out in the open in places like Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, and other places in which young Black children, free and enslaved, were going to school.
I think there were a couple of things going on. One is that I’m not sure the slavocracy appreciated the danger of literacy early on. They thought, ‘Let’s share the Bible with Black people and maybe that’ll make them better slaves.’
But what those three men demonstrated was that actually literacy was incredibly powerful. It elevated them in their communities, it allowed them to access dangerous ideas, dangerous learning, and gave them the ability to wield the power of the word to reinterpret reality, to reinterpret American ideas — or to simply interpret them — and apply them to their own situation in a way that was very revolutionary.
Religion keeps coming up in this story, first as a means of teaching enslaved people to obey, then as part of the problem with literacy, when Black preachers were targeted for spreading knowledge to their flocks. After the Civil War, preachers and churches were instrumental in establishing literacy programs and Black schools.
The religion part of this story is probably the trickiest. Black literacy is a function of even the 1700s and 1800s, when a lot of British missionaries were setting up schools here, believing it was their purpose. The delay in criminalizing literacy in Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina was a function of the religious community.
But religious ethics are not enough to create a public school system. What you see in the aftermath of the Civil War is wonderful people wanting to participate [in education] for good religious reasons, but they needed an infrastructure, they needed a support, they needed a system.
Religion can’t do that. It has never tried to do that.
Government doesn’t rely upon the good intentions of individuals. Government creates a system and an infrastructure to extend education to all. If you left it to religion, sure, there’d be great schools out there, but they’re not going to serve all children.
Could you talk a bit about the Negro Seaman Act of 1822?
It is premised on the idea that Denmark Vesey and his revolt or planned revolt in South Carolina was really the fault of outsiders bringing in ideas. So if we can just stop those outsiders from bringing pamphlets and seditious materials — if we can stop those seditious conversations — that’ll fix things.
The legacy is really a straight throughline. When we talk about the history of slavery, it is always the South’s insistence that its ability to deal with slavery was beyond federal reach. So when we talk about states’ rights or when the South talks about states’ rights, that [phrase] ‘states’ rights’ has almost always been about slavery.
The federal Constitution says that Congress shall regulate interstate commerce, and what you are doing with the Negro Seaman Act is blocking interstate commerce. It wasn’t so much that Congress was trying to press on the slavery issue, per se, but rather that you can’t be quarantining sailors who are trying to bring coats or newspapers into Charleston. So it sets off a national controversy. And you see these controversies repeat themselves over time. There is this perpetual effort by the South to leverage its states’ rights in various different ways that aren’t on their face about slavery, but really are using states' rights to try to reinforce the institution.
The Negro Seaman Act claimed to be safeguarding the health of the people of Charleston?
I think at that point they understand that they can’t just shut down the ports for any old reason just because they don’t like it. And so they really have to come up with this idea that these are effectively sick sailors — sailors carrying a contagion. I mean, literally, they would speak of it as a contagion. [So the thinking was] if we can quarantine scurvy in the bay, then we can quarantine seditious contagion in the bay as well.
It was about control of information…
We have now the whole theory of getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education, to return, supposedly, education to the states. Most of the stuff that people at the highest level are talking about, like curriculum, teacher certification, all of those things, states already completely control that anyway.
So what is it that needs to be returned to the states? And the answer is control over anti-discrimination norms. This is what has upset some people on one side of the aisle, [who] say, ‘Oh, this is racial indoctrination or sexual gender identity indoctrination,’ or whatever it may be. It’s all of this sort of race and anti-discrimination stuff that they want the federal government to get out of.
It’s fair to say it was the federal government that brought an end to racial segregation in our schools. It’s the federal government that brought the end to excluding women from certain institutions of higher education. The federal government said you have to take seriously the sexual harassment of young women in the classroom, the sexual assault of young women in the bathroom; you have to let students with disabilities actually attend your schools.
That’s the frustrating thing, because I don’t think that most Americans are on board with racial segregation, sexual harassment, and exclusion of students with disabilities. But when we say return control to the state, we’re really saying return control over those issues to the states because the rest of the issues are already in the states.
I talk about these as being coded calls of disunion, even if that’s not the intent. Because if what we do is leave the place upon which Americans find common ground and a common set of values and retreat to our religious silos, retreat to our racial silos, retreat to our political silos five days a week for 13 years with our children, how does this diverse and increasingly fractured democracy survive? I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s a question one needs to think about seriously before one runs down that road. But yet now, because of these disunion type emotions or these frustration type emotions, an increasing number of politicians are willing to walk us down that road. I think it’s with really no appreciation of the serious, serious dangers that lie ahead.
There was this brief period after the Civil War into the mid-1870s, when Reconstruction ended, that saw a flowering of Black literacy. But after that came the long period of the Jim Crow South that lasted well into the mid-20th century. You point out in “Dangerous Learning” how progress and regression came in cycles. But I felt like the period of good after the Civil War was very short and the period of bad was very, very long.
Well, that’s true. The attempt to restart democracy only lasts for a short period. And we can say the same thing about the Brown v. Board of Education era, right? It only lasts for a short period.
But as I reflect upon it, the monumental scale of what was achieved in that decade is so enormous that five, six decades had to work within that new monumental paradigm. And I think the same thing of Brown. Although desegregation didn’t start until the late ’60s, the way in which that forced society to change was so monumental that there was no undoing it.
I mean, look, empirically speaking, the gains that were achieved during desegregation have almost all been lost in terms of levels of integration. But to stop the story there is to entirely dismiss all of the other real and symbolic changes that changed the very fabric of American culture.
So, yeah, our schools may not be as integrated as they ought to be. But man, Brown pushed us to a new era. Yes, Jim Crow set in on our public schools, but you know, millions of formerly enslaved children continued to go to school, to schools they never had [before].
And millions of poor and working class whites moved out of illiteracy themselves. So it does fundamentally change the South, even if it doesn’t erase all of its sins. Brown v. Board of Education fundamentally changes the country even more, even though it doesn’t erase its sins.
The South — and America — would be in a much different place were it not for those gains. And we have to keep making those fundamental changes. Then we get pulled back to some of our old habits.
But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t moved forward.
America has fundamentally changed through those events, but yet also still has a deep, dark underbelly that’s clinging on and trying to pull us backwards. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
