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 laws against Black 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.

Read the full article about the impacts of laws against Black literacy by Mary-Liz Shaw at EdSurge.