Derek W. Black's "Dangerous Learning"

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.

In 2020, his book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, warned that current education trends represent a retreat from our nation’s foundational commitments to democracy and public education.

Black applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops the reader at a major crossroads in America history and, more specifically, Virginia’s history. Nat Turner has just led the highest profile slave revolt in U.S. history and is still at a large. John Floyd, the governor of Virginia at the time, has his misgivings about slavery but has a crisis to address, so he targets abolitionist newspapers—like William Llyod Garrison’s The Liberator—as a source of the evil the state has just experienced.

Focused solely on Virginia in the 1830s, page 99 cannot directly portray the book’s larger national narrative of the fight for freedom through black literacy, newspapers, and ultimately public education. But page 99 captures the tension that pervades so many of the most important moments in the book. Floyd leads a slaveholding state, but on the very next page, he hatches his plan to see the institution’s end. A few months later, the Virginia General Assembly is openly debating the abolition of slavery—something almost unimaginable in retrospect. That debate, in my estimation, was the South’s last gasp of rationality. From there, the South sets out on a path that can only end in war. Black literacy, independent newspapers, open debate, and a toleration of those with different perspectives all fall victim—often violently—along that path.

Those moments speak most directly to issues of race, but they are also cautionary tales of what happens when society or government refuse to allow any choir other than their own sing. And sadly, the paranoia about foreign ideas, black literacy, and what would become of the South never leaves. Though public education triumphantly rises from the ashes of the Civil War three decades later—largely through the demands and efforts of black people—old suspicions in the white community persist, trying to take public education down and control its narratives.

Visit Derek W. Black's website.

The Page 99 Test: Schoolhouse Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue