Dangerous Learning: The Story Of The Struggle For Black Literacy
From Forbes.com
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.