On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow speaks with Derek Black whose new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, traces Black literacy between the American Revolution and Reconstruction. For Black citizens, literacy was a weapon of empowerment and rebellion, while for whites, it was the only tool that could destabilize their grip on power. Derek Black says that the ghosts of this fight live on today.

Muldrow and Black talk about leaders like Denmark Vesey who inspired thousands of enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina in the nineteenth century to seek freedom. Vesey and other literate Black leaders like David Walker were seen as a threat to Southern whites because of their widely circulated writings. Muldrow and Black also connect the history of repression of Black literacy to the present, as in attacks on DEI and low rates of Black literacy in Madison, where only 4% of Black students read at grade level. 

Derek W. Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center.

Featured image of Dangerous Learning via Yale University Press.

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