Dangerous Learning

A review of Derek W. Black's new book, and a conversation with the author.

I am fully aware, in making this appeal to my much afflicted and suffering brethren, that I shall not only be assailed by those whose greatest earthly desires are, to keep us in abject ignorance and wretchedness, and who are of the firm conviction that Heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children.

—David Walker, APPEAL, IN FOUR ARTICLES; TOGETHER WITH A PREAMBLE, TO THE COLOURED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, BUT IN PARTICULAR, AND VERY EXPRESSLY, TO THOSE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WRITTEN IN BOSTON, STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS, SEPTEMBER 28, 1829

…my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one as a slave…

—Nat Turner,“Confessions”

Derek Black is a law professor and director of the University of South Carolina’s Constitutional Law Center. His new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy (Yale Press), was released last month.

The cover of Dangerous Learning.

Black’s previous book, Schoolhouse Burning, combined an exploration of the history of the advent of public education in post-Civil War America with a passionate argument about the power of public education as a democratic institution.

Dangerous Learning leans more heavily towards pure history, providing a series of detailed and complex stories about events during the period of from the early 1800s to the modern era in which American states waged varying degrees of war on Black people and their antislavery allies, and on their opportunities to learn, read, write, organize, and participate in national conversations. In that way, while it is a powerful standalone history, it is also a great companion to Schoolhouse Burning, which envisions public education as a central part of the project of American democracy.

As Black writes in the introduction to the new book, a “historical line runs alongside the Black freedom struggle connecting 1820s to today. It reveals white people perpetually resisting Black freedom (and, later, Black equality) through anti-literacy policies, attacks on public education, segregation, and now censorship” (7).

If we rewind to that conversation… about a South that had a variety of views about Black people’s place in society, about literacy, about slavery in its different permutations— if you look at it and see what that South became over the next ten years, you really oughta be afraid if you’re a moderate Republican. Actually, you really oughta be afraid if you’re a conservative Republican but you still believe in certain aspects of the American identity that are no longer part of the political agenda.

-Derek Black (in conversation)

What is especially fascinating about Dangerous Learning is its focus on the stories of specific individuals.

Black brings to life both familiar figures like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, and possibly less-familiar figures, like antislavery writer David Walker and Virginia governor John Floyd. By focusing intentionally on specifics about people, places, and events, and inherently messy human contradictions, Black lets these figures of history change from myths (or, often, from literary characters distorted through Lost Cause propaganda) to real people with full humanity.

As Black told me repeatedly, historical figures in the era he covers were “complex,” and their feelings about slavery, literacy, and other hot button issues of the day represent a “spectrum” of policies, opinions, and social movements, rather than a simple binary.

For example, South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey and Virginia’s Nat Turner each helped to mastermind attempted uprisings in their respective states, but Black paints these men very differently: Vesey as a highly self-educated free Black man with much to lose in racially diverse 1830s Charleston, and Turner as a kind of self-identified prophet who used his deep Biblical knowledge and analysis to persuade others to join his cause.

These kinds of distinction provide valuable context for the policy debates of the day, in which fearful White leaders endeavored to blame slave uprisings, not on the inherent evil of slavery, but on the influence of outside agitators, such as Northern abolitionists. That Vesey, Turner, David Walker, and other Black Americans came to believe in and support resistance to slavery through many different avenues demonstrates the wrongness of the anti-literacy campaigns’ simplistic justifications, but also the power of one thing all three men had powerfully in common: an ability to read critically and analyze deeply.

Black takes obvious pains to put the reader into a series of diverse perspectives, from revolutionary Black abolitionists like Walker to slaveholding Southern legislators, letting the facts of the history do most of the work of drawing the “historical lines” he discusses in the introduction.

And, as he told me,

I don’t need to build a narrative around some of these people’s lives to be able to say, Man, how does that help me think about who I am? How does that help me think about why education matters, about why literacy matters? I don’t think it’s the answers that matter as much as the questions…

The book also offers a fascinating context to Southern history that is often left out of American or Southern history courses.

And it provides detailed context for anyone trying to understand how we got to the present political moment.

For example, in a chapter covering Virginia’s debates over Black literacy in the early 1830s, Black writes that in the eyes of Virginians fearing a slave revolt in the style of Charleston’s Stono Rebellion, “The problem at home was Black preachers— literate Black preachers, in particular” (101).

The way Black describes Virginia governor Floyd’s concerns about “inflammatory” (101) preachers and their rhetoric calls to mind “divisive content” and “tenets” of modern anti-CRT legislation. (Floyd even contemplated to expelling free Black people from Virginia.)

Yet, importantly Floyd was also, at least at one point, determined to oversee the abolition of slavery in Virginia before the end of his time in office. Floyd, who had married into a slaveholding family, represents the kinds of complexity Black consistently brings to his descriptions of historical figures: a slaveowner who did not belief in the “inherent inferiority of Blacks,” a “moderate” who called for further suppressing Black rights in Virginia as part of an eventual path to abolishing slavery.

As I tell my students every year in Constitutional Law, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment reframes federalism, reframes the entire Constitution. For the first time in the history of this country, the United States Constitution says, “No State shall…” The South, and other parts of the country, have held onto an idea of states rights that does in fact go back to the founding. The problem is it actually stopped in 1868 and they refuse to acknowledge that.

-Derek Black (in conversation)

Ultimately, the the pre-Civil War United States, as described in the Black, was facing significant existential problems that feel very much like those we’re facing now: “America was grappling with new technologies [newspapers, printing presses, pamphlets] and services that, at times, seemed beyond its control… If elites could no longer control information and narratives, the status quo that accrued to their benefit might be in danger” (39). And the complexities and tensions within the movements and individuals portrayed in the book further reflect how much history echoes in the present moment.

This connection becomes explicit by the end of the book, where Black writes,

Placing these current events against the map of the Confederacy is equally disturbing. Among states that were part of the Union prior to the Civil War, ten of the twelve that have passed anti-critical-race-theory legislation are below the Mason-Dixon line. Among newer states, another pattern jumps out. All seven that have passed such legislation— North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Montana, Utah, and Oklahoma— have overwhelmingly white populations. In six of these seven states, the white population exceeds 86 percent… (280)

The argument that emerges from Black’s careful analysis of historical events is that literacy was key to the struggle for Black freedom and self-empowerment.

He writes, for example, that “Vesey decided to use his literacy to construct new meanings, create new problems, and posit new solutions. He had moved beyond reading as a mechanical skill for acquiring information and instead used it as a tool for critically understanding reality. And if he could critically examine the world around him, he might disrupt its existing hierarchy of power” (25).

That, of course, sounds a lot like the purported goal of modern English and literacy instruction in public schools, a project which has been under direct attack by anti- “woke” censors for the past several years. As Black told me, it has perhaps been a mistake to assume that these attacks are about schools, themselves; instead, he said, they are about “consolidating power” among groups pushing what he calls an unconstitutional anti-public school vision. (For more on this, see my conversation with Black, below.)

This overlap between anti-literacy and anti-education movements and unconstitutional or anti-federalist movements is, of course, nothing new. In the lead-up to the Civil War, pro-slavery states used the threat or reality of government censorship not only to stifle Black literacy, but to silence abolitionist speech and even the very discussion of the issues involved in slavery.

In Chapter Four, Black describes Georgia’s legislature’s apparent violation the First Amendment when it banned Walker’s treatise on American slavery— Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America— and began “quarantining” all free Black people entering the state for forty days (73). Georgia officials even arrested a journalist for asking for a copy of Walker’s book before the law against it had passed. (The irony of Southern states using the pretext of quarantines to defy the federal government is pretty potent in the post-Covid era.)

Similarly, Black writes, “[‘proslavery theorist’ Whitmarsh] Seabrook also fired a warning shot at the press. He professed fidelity to the freedom of the press in one line, only to limit it in the next: freedom of the press should apply only to literature within the scope of accepted Southern norms” (54).

Virginia then proposed a bill that levied penalties up to the death penalty for sharing literature that might incite slave insurrections (77), and cracked down on “free Black literacy” (78). That it failed probably because it went as far as to prevent religious instruction of slaves— which, as Black repeatedly describes in the book, was a major point of contention even among proslavery religious leaders and politicians— again speaks to a lack of consensus about slavery in America. And it highlights the motivation for censorship, throughout history and in the present, of discussions about race in our country: because these are and have been hotly debated issues, the debate, itself, frightens the status quo.

In the book I say, it’s dangerous when you refuse to listen to other people. And that’s what the South did, is it refused to listen to anyone, wouldn’t even dare allow Congress to receive petitions requesting the abolition of slavery, because the mere receipt of the thing, they thought, was too much to bear.

-Derek Black (in conversation)

But Black also argues effectively that the suppression of Black literature in the 1800s was largely reactionary, with states like South Carolina and Georgia presenting an outsized, sometimes murderous, response to the threat they perceived was being caused by abolitionist literature— refusing to contemplate, for example, that the institution of slavery, itself, would naturally drive rebellion.

Even if it wasn’t his original intent (the book was published before the November 2024 election), Dangerous Learning speaks to many of the most significant anxieties and crises of our own era, in its depiction of the anxieties and crises of America’s past.

As Black told me, attacks on literacy, and on the institution of public education, should scare people across the political spectrum, and the history of these attacks should feel familiar to anyone paying attention to current events.

But, as he writes, “When Southern states escalated the war of words through censorship, they revealed a weakness. If Southern politicians really believed their way of life depended on blockading the South against antislavery ideas, rhetoric, and literature, it made sense for abolitionists to test that belief” (124).

Professor Black will be giving a talk about the book on February 20 at All Good Books. (I work at the store.)

Black also met with me over Zoom to discuss the book in a wide-ranging conversation. The following is an edited version of that conversation. In addition to Dangerous Learning, we discuss Schoolhouse Burning, the current politics of school vouchers, and what Black calls “democratic erosion”— the subject of his most recent research.

You write in the introduction to Dangerous Learning that what began as a book about history became relevant during the past several years in a way you felt you had to address. How did this change the final version of the book?

DB: This really was a sort of passion project early on, because [the history is] so fascinating, and, you know, it became something else. Well, I should say I added chapters to it when I started finding some things, particularly during the ‘40s when [Southern decision-makers] started messing with the textbooks… There was this period where they started imposing silence on the region and then they started getting paranoid… a big Southern newspaper took it upon themselves to start reviewing textbooks in the ‘40s…

There was one review in which [the author] was saying, This book is not fit for use in Southern schools— it was a geography book— because it had devoted too much attention to Northern crops, and it was by implication denigrating Southern crops.

Then you have… a high ranking official in Mississippi giving this lecture, and he’s got this textbook up there, and he’s reading from it, citing the parade of horribles. And he’s saying, After I saw this thing, I wanted to go into the classroom and see if there were any teachers really teaching it, and I found a teacher, and she had this book, and she told me that she had ripped those pages out and wasn’t using them. I didn’t believe her, you know, I’m sure she was a Northern teacher…

All that to say, that was when I said, Oh, yeah, I need to write about this, and this isn’t just old [news].

But then there’s this other part, which is sort of the romantic or nostalgic part of me, that’s just [fascinated] with the human part, that [feels] it doesn’t need to be relevant; it’s just fascinating to think about people’s personal experiences and how people are relating to one another, how they’re dealing with conflict, or how they’re not dealing with it.

South Carolina and other states have formally partnered with the edutainment company PragerU. Among other things, the materials adopted by South Carolina from PragerU explicitly present Douglass as a kind of moderate who counsels students not to listen to radicals, and specifically criticizes Black Lives Matter-style protests. I was struck by a line from your book, “When Frederick Douglass implored crowds of Black men to join the Union Army in 1863, he offered a simple message: ‘Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston’”. What do you think are the goals and/ or dangers of this approach to history?

DB: That’s fascinating to try to wrap my head around. You know, I do try to be as objective as I can be… but, you know, to put words in the mouth of a figure who is as seminal to Black freedom as Frederick Douglass is a dangerous thing. And I think it’s dangerous regardless of which side of that freedom you land on…. [The history] is not as simple as, really, anyone is telling, and I’m not saying that my telling got it all [objectively correct], either: these are complex people, but… when you seek to leverage the symbolic importance of someone like Frederick Douglass, that’s not something you play around with…