If knowledge is power, withholding an education is also a way of denying power. University of South Carolina School of Law professor Derek W. Black joins guest host John McCaa to talk about the history of Southern leaders withholding literacy from Black people from the end of the Civil War through Reconstruction and beyond – and about the lengths that Black Americans have gone to get an education. His book is, “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy“.
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Transcript
John McCaa [00:00:00] From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m John McCaa, sitting in for Krys Boyd. It was the celebrated author William Faulkner who, in his book, “Requiem for a Nun,” penned the oft-quoted phrase, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. From the beginning of the republic, America’s founders believed a well-informed and educated citizenry fundamental to survival as a democracy. But lately, the idea of a right to an education has been battered. And my guest this hour argues, for one group of people in one section of the country in particular, it is another chapter in an old conflict. Derek W. Black is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He also directs the law school’s constitutional law center. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.” In it, he details two centuries of back and forth struggle over supporting literacy among African-Americans. Derek, welcome to Think.
Derek W. Black [00:01:14] Thanks for having me on, John. It’s really a pleasure to be back with you.
John McCaa [00:01:18] A few years ago, you wrote Schoolhouse Burning about our slow move away from this idea of supporting public education and how that might be damaging the country. Still continually sounds like.
Derek W. Black [00:01:31] Yeah, unfortunately, it’s kind of gotten worse in many respects. I thought, you know, a few years ago that our public schools might be the institution that helped us find our way back to a sense of community, a sense of togetherness, but it seems that we just have torn ourselves further and further apart through our disputes over our public schools over the last few years.
John McCaa [00:01:53] In this book, you start off with a look at your native South Carolina. So we’re talking around 1820. There are like twice as many enslaved people as whites in Charleston and the low country. That had to be some of some concern for the for the White residents.
Derek W. Black [00:02:09] Yeah, I mean, there definitely was this growing anxiety about the population imbalance, I guess. Um, although, you know, there was, there’s a lot of sort of self delusion as well. You know, that folks, you were telling themselves that Black people were happy and things were fine and you know that whites were superior and this was just a natural order. So, I think people with a little bit of sense thought they had a problem. Uh, but there were a lot other folks, I that sort of let it go, so to speak. But there also was this other part of that history that I think we miss so often because we look back on the pre-Civil War era with such a flat view of what happened. And in Charleston, for instance, there really was a spectrum of existence for enslaved people, which was eye-opening for me. I mean, a lot of folks were living, a lot of enslaved people. did not live in the household with the people who enslaved them. They lived somewhere else, right? So they were on their own roof and managed their own time, but they didn’t own all of their own wages.
John McCaa [00:03:13] One of the things you point out in the book, there’s this false belief that there was no education at all for African Americans in the South before the Civil War. You said, that’s not quite true.
Derek W. Black [00:03:23] Yeah, I mean, there had been a big push in the 1700s, particularly from European missionaries to educate Black people and others in the South, right. It was sort of this Christian duty. And that continued on well into the 1800s, up into the 1830s. But there were also, you know, free Black people living in Charleston, and I talk about Charleston as really being the Black Mecca in America in many respects at that point in time. so on the peninsula of Charleston, you had a lot of folks I said that were already living, you know, all they were enslaved, they were living on their own. But you had lot of people who had worked their way into freedom or had immigrated here from elsewhere, and so they started their own self-help societies and started their schools in Charleston. And so, yeah, there were schools serving both Black and enslaved children in several of our major southern cities.
John McCaa [00:04:18] You go into very real detail about organizations like Brown Fellowship Society in Charleston. Tell us what that was all about and what they were doing, who it was and what they were doing.
Derek W. Black [00:04:30] Yeah. I mean, we, we had some Black families that were pretty well to do here in Charleston and they certainly, you know, wanted to educate themselves. And so they formed education societies to hire teachers, to chill, to teach their own children. But they also saw the need to uplift the community as well. And so you had some of these societies that, you know, ask people to make, you know, annual or regular donations. And those donations would go to educate. uh… you know children who didn’t have you know resources including enslaved children and it was a really big deal in fact there was one i’m i’m blanking on his name at the moment but one gentleman that allowed them to construct a building in his uh… in his back lot to run a school for children.
John McCaa [00:05:16] One of the things that’s interesting that you talk about in the book is they had schools, but there were some rules about what is going to be taught in terms of those schools.
Derek W. Black [00:05:26] There were some, some conflicts about what was being shared early on, you know, and it varied across time. I think, I think a lot of that began to crop up probably in the 1830s. I think you know, as a growing city and as a growing Black community that early on. It’s just like all growth is good growth to be quite honest early on and so. You know, the early education I think was really sort of focused on the classics. You know? I mean, I think that was the sort of style of learning at the time. And so, you know, your Black schools were studying the classics as were your White schools, I presume, although I didn’t really study the white schools to be, to be honest.
John McCaa [00:06:06] So we’ve got the Brown Fellowship Society. There’s also an 18, if I remember right, 1803, somewhere around there. There’s the Minor Moralist Society, and they’re working with some of the children of people who are enslaved.
Derek W. Black [00:06:20] Yeah, that’s right. And it’s really, you know, I will say my, my research kind of hit some dead ends there, I mean, it’s sort of fascinating to hear the names of individuals and to see this sort of public facing documents, but you know there may have been more rich, uh, sort of documentation of some of these schools at some point, but the later repression, which we’ll get to later, I think sort of stamps all this out. There was a lot of repression of the Black community. so. Unfortunately, a lot of these stories are lost to history, unfortunately, but I know that they existed, I sort of know the locations they existed. But getting into the details of how many students or who exactly they were is often a bit of a challenge.
John McCaa [00:07:02] You know, along comes this guy that you focus on named Denmark. Some people call him Denmark VC, some Denmark Vesey, but he somehow manages to free himself. And in his story is quite unique in how it changes just about everything.
Derek W. Black [00:07:20] I mean, Denmark VC is one of the most fascinating figures in American history I’ve ever come across. I mean. You know, forget my thesis of the book or the narrative I’m trying to tell. I mean this is a person who’s born into slavery in the Caribbean. Um, you know, it is picked up by captain Joseph Vesey and is going to be sold into slavery and Haiti on a different Island, but on the, the, the boat, uh, over, um, Apparently, they noticed there’s something special about him and they bring him up out of the belly of the slave ship and he lives above board on the way over. But unfortunately, when he gets to Haiti, they sell him like the rest of the people. But he’s sharp enough that he feigns epilepsy in the fields. And as a result, there’s this law at the time that could force you to take back enslaved people because purportedly they were defective goods. And so Captain Joseph Vesey has to take Denmark back because of his feigned epilepsy. And I’m pretty sure it was feigned because he never had any problems after that. but He then sells and learns the sort of the ways of the sea and the ways of commerce with Joseph Fessy over the next two years. And then ultimately, VC decides that he’s going to settle in Charleston and Denmark. That’s where Denmark begins to work and live outside of his enslavers immediate presence. And I guess he was in the the habit of buying lottery tickets and he bought a lottery ticket. And what do you know? That lottery he won, he won the lottery and used the proceeds, uh, to purchase his own freedom from, from Joseph VC. And so he walked free with a few hundred bucks in his, in his pocket and, and, you know, lived out the next two decades, uh as a pretty radical figure there in Charleston, South Carolina.
John McCaa [00:09:25] Yeah, he frees himself, but he also starts reading. And in his reading, he comes across ideas about being equal, ideas that really make him question what he’s seeing going on around him in terms of things like slavery. And he actually plans a revolt.
Derek W. Black [00:09:44] Yeah, I mean, Denmark is remarkable. I mean again, this goes to the flatness with which many people think about Black people’s experience prior to the end of slavery. You know, he saw the revolutionary period in the United States. He lived in a community that was proud of its independence, you know, spoke of liberty and equality of men. Right. And so he was part of a community that really had these traditional American ideas. He also saw Haiti become independent and where Black people rose up and freed themselves for independence there. And so he really is a revolutionary forefather, but on the different side of the color line. And he’s really absorbing all of this American ideology, but he’s also using his literacy, which I think he probably picked up while he was enslaved, using his literacy. to read the classics. He’s using it to read congressional debates and to engage the debates about whether or not slavery should extend into the territories. And so he’s just got so much going on inside of his head as a result of literacy. And he’s using these ideas to encourage the community, right, to think of a future that’s bigger and better than the one that they currently have. And in my mind, I think it comes down to probably a seminal point in time, which is the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As best I can tell, Denmark believed or hoped, given American ideas, that we might cut slavery short, that it might not extend into the territories. And he had a lot of reason to believe that based upon speeches he’s reading by, you know, US senators. But when United States decides to extend slavery into Missouri, I think his hopes are dashed and it is in the year, year and a half after that, that he begins to plot a revolt, um, which again, he uses his literacy to do he’s taking, you know, keeping lists of names, you know writing a letter to the president of Haiti, um sort of. drawing on his experience sailing and saying, hey, you know, I know how to take over this city and I can sell its people back to Haiti where the president will meet us with open arms.
John McCaa [00:12:08] This revolt that he’s talking about, this is a guy who’s, if I remember right, he’s a lay minister, so he’s got people who are already looking at him, talking to him, listening to his ideas, and there’s great fear of what’s going to happen, and then when this both actually occurs, people are killed.
Derek W. Black [00:12:26] Yeah, well, unfortunately, the people that that were accused were killed. And I don’t know that whether all the people who were accused actually did anything, but yeah, I mean, there was, it seems to me, there’s no doubt that um, they would have taken the city and slaughtered, uh, lots of white folks. And, and look, the white authorities were crystal clear. They thought that would happen. So they then respond with these very rushed. trials in which I think they kill about 60 or so Black people and then banish a lot of them out of the state. And what’s sort of interesting is his literacy really comes to the fore during that trial, that the authorities begin to realize that it was his power as a lay minister, his ability to reinterpret the Bible, his abilities to engage these other texts that gave him in the community that put ideas in his head, so to speak. and that literacy was dangerous. And they also saw it up close and personal because they assigned him a white attorney to defend him at these proceedings. And he said, I don’t want them, don’t need them. I’ll defend myself. So he actually engaged in the cross-examination of witnesses himself, and literally knew the Constitution well enough to demand his Sixth Amendment right to confront his accusers, which to be clear, the Supreme Court didn’t actually apply to states for, you know, another. you know hundred years so he used to be ahead of his time in that respect to just uh… a really remarkable man
John McCaa [00:14:01] Denmark Veseys, his revolt, it really changes things across the South in terms of how people are looking at the idea of literacy and education among even free Black people.
Derek W. Black [00:14:14] Yeah, I mean, there is this moment in time, right? Where suddenly they wake up and go, wait a minute, they being, you know, sort of the White authorities, we’ve got Black schools going on here. We’ve got, you, know, free thinkers, including, you know, three persons of color. And this is entire, this is very dangerous. Now the rest of the South is looking on in horror, right. At the possibility of what could have happened. But then there’s also this sense that, well, maybe that’s just a South Carolina problem, right? So the first movement to sort of tamp this down really starts in South Carolina. And South Carolina then tries to convince itself, well, part of the problem is that these Black sailors are bringing in materials from outside the state, right. I mean, how was it that Denmark was reading these newspapers and these scandalous materials? Well, it must be other Black sailors. So what they end up doing initially, is to quarantine the port of Charleston such that no Black person could get off the ship freely in the port Charleston. In fact, any Black person arriving in the Port of Charlston would be held in jail until the ship left and the charges for incarcerating them will be billed to the captain. And so this set off sort of a huge sort of shipping and commercial problem, but they thought, if we can just shut down the borders to these outside ideas, maybe, maybe that’ll get the problem under control.
John McCaa [00:15:44] Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. This is for the authorities at the time, they see these ideas as poison, as dangerous, as things coming from outside. And their goal is to keep the local folks away from all of those ideas.
Derek W. Black [00:16:03] Yeah, I mean, the legalistic idea they adopted is, I guess, as creative as it is humorous. So you know, local authorities always have the right to quarantine pestilence, right? If someone’s got some sort of virus that puts the local population at risk, then you can quarantine them so that the virus doesn’t spread. So they happen upon this theory that these ideas are the pestilents. They are the virus. They are the disease that will affect the city if it’s allowed to come in. And therefore they have the right to quarantine these Black sailors. And, um, you know, the federal government didn’t think so much of that in order to the British, but that’s, that was the view of Charlestonians and South Carolinians at the time.
John McCaa [00:16:50] Denmark is actually, he’s one of the people that’s hanged in all of this.
Derek W. Black [00:16:54] That’s right. Denmark is executed. Um, you know, he, again, he tries to defend himself and, you know, says, bring, bring my accusers before me. Um, but, but you know they, they sentenced him, uh, to death and any other, quite confused about him. And I think that’s something worth noting is that this is a free person of color doing pretty well for himself, you don’t compare it to a lot of folks and, uh you know had a little bit of money, had some skills. they’re saying to themselves, why in the world does this guy revolt, right? You know, if enslaved people had revolted, maybe they’d have understood that. But why is this, this guy? And that’s where that literacy connection comes in, right. This sort of idea that his, his mind has been infected with these ideas and that’s what’s led him to revolt. And, um, and so that’s sort of a main thought, um on the part of, of the authorities and then, you know, some other folks start writing about it. There’s a lot of sort of. newspaper magazine type stuff afterwards that really starts saying we’ve made a mistake here, right? We let Black people, you know, learn to read and write. That was a mistake. We can’t take it away from those who already have it, but we have to, we have to stop it that no good can, can come from it. And so there, this is where the sort of movement against Black literacy really begins.
John McCaa [00:18:15] The authorities, they’re attacking literacy, even churches that are teaching literacy. In fact, in Charleston, don’t they tear down his church? They create this municipal guard of over a hundred people, which leads to the construction of something we still have, which is the Citadel.
Derek W. Black [00:18:32] That’s right. So they, they tear down the church that, well, it really, to back up just for a moment, the, you know, Denmark Vesey was part of a group that had a break from the local white Presbyterian and other large churches there because they were being discriminated against and, and not giving full, full rights. And there was even burial rights were being disputed. So, they wanted to start their own church. They do that. This is sort of part of the power base for, for Denmark. And so after his his planned revolt, yeah, it is destroyed. That community, and it’s worth noting, that is what would become the AME Zion Church, which is also the place where Dylann Roof massacred parishioners during the Obama administration. So this is a church with a very long history, and he was sort of part of the founding group of it there.
John McCaa [00:19:25] There’s a guy in 1829 that you talk about named David Walker. He publishes this series of essays that are called “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” and he’s talking about how slavery violates the Declaration of Independence and Christianity and natural rights. This is widely distributed, and this is something that’s causing, again, spreading some ideas, is causing some great fears among people.
Derek W. Black [00:19:52] Yeah, so David Walker was also, well, he was born free. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and was educated there. And the best we can tell, or I should say, I’m quite certain based upon the information I had that he actually met, uh, Denmark Vessey that he went to Charleston, uh for a period, I think in his twenties and he talks about being in Charleston and it’s just kind of hard for me to imagine. that they didn’t cross paths, particularly given the life trajectory that David Walker takes afterwards. So shortly after Denmark’s revolt, David Walker relocates to Philadelphia. And this makes sense with him being part of that church community in Charleston as well, because not only did they destroy the church, they also ran off a lot of people that they thought might have somehow or another been tangentially related to it. And so… No one ever speaks of that story. I suggest in the book that David Walker is probably part of a pact in which they all sort of agreed to not speak of one another in a way that could cause problems later in time, but David Walker leaves Charleston, goes to Philadelphia for a little while, um, is involved with the AME church there, then settles in Boston and becomes a newspaper man. There were, there were Black newspapers that were being started at that particular time. and he was developing relationships with agents. That’s the way that newspapers used to get circulated was you had to know somebody, right? You had to somebody in a town and they would distribute your papers for you. And so he knew folks all up and down the Eastern Seaboard because he had come from Wilmington, had been in those ports, had been Charleston. And so, he decides rather than just distributing these newspapers that are sort of about national Black politics and the colonization or anti-colonization movement. that he’s going to write this manifesto, so to speak, that was and probably remained the most radical document authored by a Black American in the 1800s. And, you know, he calls on Black people to rise up and seize their freedom. And he’s talking about in the North, he’s talking about the South. Um, and, and the implicate, he, he doesn’t advocate for violence, but, but the implications are pretty clear that if necessary, they should do so by force. But he also says the first step, the first to freedom is mental emancipation and mental impact emancipate will come through education and he prints several copies of this and he doesn t circulate it in Boston or New York. Um, I mean, it’s not, I, I guess it’s only funny in retrospect, I suppose, because how dangerous it was. But he’s circulating it in Charleston, South Carolina. He circulated it in Savannah, Georgia. And of course, doing it secretly, and Black people are handing it to one another and sharing it with ministers and whatnot. But when it is found in Savannah Georgia in the late 1829, early 1830, it takes three days for the Georgia legislature to criminalize Black literacy, to criminalize these sorts of of periodicals and to pass an act just like Charleston had, which is shutting down the port so that Black people can’t just freely come into the state.
John McCaa [00:23:23] It’s fair to say that during this period, the free press disappears from the South because these ideas are being limited.
Derek W. Black [00:23:33] Yeah, I mean, it starts with, you know, the sort of David Walker’s, you know, appeal, but, you know, over the next decade, it really moves to all forms of Northern literature that the South becomes incredibly paranoid of, of newspapers printed in the North, obviously, you know, they’re, they are paranoid about, you know, anti-slavery, uh, newspapers, which were, you know, literally they broke into the Charleston post office. and looted it of all of the Northern newspapers and antislavery papers, took them into the town square and set them afire in a bonfire and hung people like William Lloyd Garrison in effigy. William Lloyd-Garrison was a publisher of a major antislaver newspaper. And from that, there are these vigilance committees that form in hundreds of locations across the South to make sure that um… these northern seditious newspapers do not enter the community that and actually eventually becomes a crime in some places to be in possession of what they deem seditious materials.
John McCaa [00:24:46] So 1831, we have the big rebellion, which of course is the Nat Turner rebellion. And people really believe that Turner got these ideas, again, from reading these David Walker essays.
Derek W. Black [00:25:01] Yeah, I mean, they were convinced because, you know, the David Walker, I mean, we, I sort of jumped through it pretty quickly, but his, his pamphlet continues to circulate through the South. It actually needs to be circulating pretty heavily in North Carolina, which partly because he, he probably knew more people in North Carolina than anywhere else. And those papers filter up from North Carolina into Virginia as well. And so Nat Turner’s from South Hampton, Virginia, which is relatively close. to the North Carolina border. And so there’s this sense that he must have, he must’ve written, read this pamphlet. Why else would he revolt? That was the idea. And so, Nat Turner’s ends up being the bloodiest slave rebellion in the United States history, but as best historians can tell, he didn’t read anything but the Bible. He was not familiar with this. you know, manifesto, and didn’t really need to be, right? He was an enslaved person, his desire for freedom didn’t need to propelled by a Northern newspaper, but they’re convinced. They’re convinced that those things are linked.
John McCaa [00:26:12] You know, Virginia’s legislature was so afraid in all this that there was even for a little while some discussion of ending slavery.
Derek W. Black [00:26:22] First of all, I’d never heard of this until I began researching. And I don’t think many Americans have that, you know, at the end of 1830 into 1831, the Virginia legislature for about two months debates, uh the abolition of slavery. The governor of Virginia had written in his diary in the fall after Nat Turner’s rebellion that he would see the end of this institution before his governorship ended. so. You know, I mean, there’s been some, some talk in the, in the media, you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates had said, had said you know last year he was sort of reflecting on, on Turner’s revolt and it made this kind of suggestion that, you know, the South would have never let go. I mean that, that’s, you know, probably true. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise, but I think it also sells short. the fact that there really were people grappling with this issue. I mean, the man who put down Nat Turner’s revolt, the man who led the military force that secured the state after his revolt, he was a major speaker in saying that, although he enslaved, I think he had about a hundred people he enslaved that he believed the state needed to bring an end to the institution. And there were a lot of folks, particularly in what is now West Virginia, who were saying this state will never be safe, right? That this is an institution with which deals cannot be made. So long as we enslave people, there will always be violence.
John McCaa [00:27:58] So the schools were still there, they just went underground. There are some passages in the book where you talk about Janet Duvaux and her mother. You talk about Daniel Payne opens the school, Susie King Taylor, if I remember right, she has a school where she has the kids. There are notes that the kids have as they walk in and they say, well, we’re learning a trade. So the school become, they go underground.
Derek W. Black [00:28:23] Yeah, I mean, look, now after all this time, we are to the real book. This, this book began as a passion project to, to tell the story of these secret schools, right? That’s what I wanted to write about, but you know, they were secret for a reason and good secret schools keep their secrets. And so, you know getting to the bottom of all of the details was very hard, but it is clear and we verify that there are a lot of these secret schools and a lot of secret learning going on. And Savannah is the best example, at least the most well documented example of this, that after David Walker’s appeal shows up in the city and they criminalize Black literacy. They criminalize these Black schools. The learning doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. And so. A group of women, um, you know, I don’t have all their names, but it’s clear there’s a group of women who are operating schools out of their homes. And, and the one woman, you know, from the, to the outside world, it looks like she’s running a soup kitchen or a bread kitchen or something like that. You got all these kids coming and going and they’re carrying bags around that look like they’re delivering bread or soup or what have you. And you assume that they’re in there helping her make bread. But no, that that’s not what they were doing. They were in there making learning and she even told them, you know, well, I want you to come at different times of the day. Cause if all of you guys show up, you know, at nine o’clock they’ll think some things up. But if you’re just kind of coming and going like any other business, no one will think anything of it. And when you leave at the end of the day, right, you all need to leave in different directions. You can’t all leave in the same, but some of these kids, a lot of them would meet up and have play time, you know, end of day, but they’d leave different times, different directions And yeah, these women carried on secret schools for three decades, right under the noses of, of White people in downtown Savannah and Susie King, who you mentioned, I mean, her story is quite remarkable as well. She said, you know, since white folks think that Black people can’t read and write in Savannah, then she was actually, uh, able to create a certain modicum of freedom for Black people, uh and downtown. She was writing notes left and right for people to say oh yeah you know sam needs to go fetch x y and z on the other side of town so of a Black person you know got stopped out at night going where they might want me with a going to visit a friend uh… a lover you know i don’t know uh… you know that is what about a pass written by susie king that folks assume was written by you know the slave master and they went on about their business so yeah this is really sort of Radical subversive education community operating in Savannah. I imagine it probably operated with just as much, if not more strength than Charleston, um, just, just not as well documented there.
John McCaa [00:31:14] So I really wanna stay with these underground schools that we’re talking about because even though there was pressure put on people to stop schooling folks, the schooling did not stop. It just went underground. And you talk about this Janet DeVoe and her mother and they opened several schools in the Savannah area.
Derek W. Black [00:31:34] They are the ones that seem to have had the longest running schools and, you know, the DeVoe home is still in, in Savannah, so I went down and walked around the town to try to see more about, just to get a sense of the place, because you’re right, it’s so fascinating. It’s just like, I want to look in the windows of the places where the secret school happened. Unfortunately, I think their final home was not probably the one where the Secret Schools were at. But when the Union forces showed up… Right? When it was not until the union forces showed up in, I don’t know, 64 or so, that these schools finally come above ground. And so she tells her story, very, you know, we don’t have a lot of records of it says, yeah, you know here’s my school, here’s what students, I’ve been doing this for 30 some odd years. And so these women and schools like that become the backbone of what become the Friedman schools after the end of the Civil War.
John McCaa [00:32:33] Daniel Payne, I believe his dad actually taught him. His dad was with the minor moralist society, but Daniel Payne has a school, opens a school too.
Derek W. Black [00:32:45] Yeah, Daniel Payne was in Charleston. And so, you know, South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina had a lot of sort of fits and starts with its education. So, you, things would flare up, you know, they’d, they tear down the Black church. They’d, they’d suppress, you know, Black literacy, but the state legislature had not passed an absolute ban on Black literacy in the late twenties. And so some of these schools would, would pop back up. and they end up you know, finally banning it in 35, but, um, and so Daniel Payne was one of these, you know his father had taught him to, to read and write as a young man. I think his father passes away. And so he then needs the help of these sort of, um societies, Black societies that are raising funds to educate kids like him. And so, he had come out of these early, um these sort of early self help bBack schools and Charleston, and then decides he’s going to start his own school. His first one. You know, he’s a young man. I don’t, he was 20 or so and he didn’t, he doesn’t mind his finances too well, I guess. But then a couple of years later, he goes back at it again and becomes quite successful and is operating his school. And it really, I mean, to read his diary seems like just a wonderful learning environment. You know the kids are sort of exploring both books and classics in the room, but they’re going out in the field and doing biology in. And botany, he was sort of really interested in that. And I think one of the things that kind of got him in trouble at one point was he wanted, I forget what the species of snake was, but he wanted to get a snake for the kids to dissect. And so he’d heard that this, you know, this white plantation guy on the outskirts had such things. And so, he sends, you know, one of his students, I think himself out there to go, to go get one. well You know, he, sort of out himself by asking for this snake and a lot of questioning follows that. And so he kind of gets put on the map as potentially a dangerous person or a sharer of dangerous learning. And about a year later, the legislature actually does pass new legislation banning Black schooling in the state. And, you know, it was, it really, Daniel Payne struggled with that moment. And you read his diary and he’s He’s just tortured over leaving these children behind and what he saw is his life’s work. But I guess he had enough notoriety that he knew he just couldn’t stay, that he couldn’t operate a secret school. So he leaves and becomes a major figure in the AME church after that.
John McCaa [00:35:27] You know, with the end of the Civil War, education really becomes something that people want. They want to vote, but people really want, they want an education, the Department of Education develops the federal level, continue expansion of education for everybody. The difficulty that people have is didn’t have much luck when they went to the courts to try to get some support for that kind of thing.
Derek W. Black [00:35:54] Yeah, well, I mean, so initially what happens is, I mean, this relates to today, this idea. And I’ll just quick sidebar this idea that the federal and education is a new thing at the federal department of education is a new thing. Well, not so fast because actually it is the federal government working in conjunction with the freedmen that build. Schools that end up serving and educating I think about a hundred and fifty thousand children or so in in those early years of the Civil War and in reconstruction And so the federal federal government is supporting these schools helps it grow and then those schools and the people who come out of those schools become and the teachers in those schools become legislators. They become the people who go on to state constitutional conventions They become the people who put a mandate and state constitution to create a public education system. And so if we sort of just wrap this sort of circle up real quickly, um, you know, it is actually the repression of literacy of Black people that makes it the forbidden forbidden fruit. That then makes it the thing that I think Black people want more than anything at the end of the Civil War. And they, as a result of that push public education into existence in the South public education. had no public, I should say the South had no public education system to speak of until the end of the Civil War, until Black people forced it into existence.
John McCaa [00:37:23] We’ve gotten rid of this idea that the Department of Education is kind of a 20th century thing. But over the years, we’ve seen this dramatic cut in funding and support for this education, particularly of African Americans. Number one, we had separate schools even back then.
Derek W. Black [00:37:40] Well, yeah, so there’s this interesting thing, which is, you know, at the same time, I’m telling this triumphant story of Black people seeing education as freedom’s line and trying to cross that line. We have people on the other side of the line trying to push them back, right? And so Black people experienced tremendous success, actually even before the end of the Civil War. The first schools actually start in 62, not in 1862, not 1865, at end of war. And with the help of federal troops, right? And the protection of Black voters, this system comes into being, right, that comes into and persist into the 1870s. The problem is, is those same cultural fears about Black education that had become part of Southern society after Denmark Vesey, after David Walker, after Nat Turner and the like, those people come back into power. They come back into power in the 18 seventies and they don’t end public education, right? But they see the education of Black people as dangerous and wasteful. And as a result of that, they say, look, we need to go back and rewrite these constitutions. We need to write these constititions to mandate segregation. We need change the budgets to underfund Black schools. And for that matter, underfund a lot of white schools. And so there’s this attack on Black education and, you know, to some extent, public education itself that I say grows out of that earlier period in the 20s and 30s when it was seen as being dangerous to the southern way of life.
John McCaa [00:39:20] The late legal scholar, Derek Bell, years ago wrote this book called, that you and I both have chatted about before, called “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” in which he argues that from time to time, legal victories in this fight against racism in America, they do happen, but he insists that they’re short-lived and that there really hasn’t been much in the way of just absolute perfect. straightforward accomplishment. It just goes back and forth, and two steps forward, one step back, that sort of.
Derek W. Black [00:39:53] Yeah. I mean, look, um, it is hard to argue with, with Derek Bell’s, uh, idea that it’s, it’s two steps forward and one step back. I think the question that I grapple with and I grappled with in this book is, you know, how big are the two steps for it and, and how big is the step back, or maybe even the two-steps back. And, you know I talked to my students about this, you know, let’s just jump forward to Brown versus the Board of Education. For a short period of time, we saw the greatest rise and or sort of the greatest shrinking of achievement gaps in the history of this country. We saw the percentage of Black children attending schools with White children go from zero percent to 40 percent in just a few years. It’s really not right after Brown, but after 1964, the Civil Rights Act. And then we’d lose all that. We sort of slowly lose all those gains into the 90s. And so we can look back at that and say, look, America was never going to change. That’s an incredible failure. And I have a lot of regret and remorse over that period. But it’s also the case that Brown versus the Board of Education fundamentally changed the United States of America. There is no Civil Rights Act of 1964 without Brown. that there is no opening of the workplace to Black people without, uh, brown, I may go on and on and, and so have we failed to achieve all that we hoped for? Absolutely. We have, do we have so much more to achieve? Absolutely. But, you know, I, I do think it is true that these are, these are fundamental moments that change America. And the same way I told you earlier, the South did not have public education at the end of the Civil War. And then it did, right? I mean, the public education project in the South might have been delayed by decades, if not half a century, were it not for those magic moments. So again, you know, it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t clean, but you know what is in life? And I don’t, I’m not sort of short short-selling, you know all the bad things that have occurred, but it really, these are triumphant moments. And so I don’ know, I’m a guy who likes to see the glass half full. And so. You know, we got a lot of work to do, but there really have been some triumphant moments in Black people’s struggles and what they have accomplished. And I’ll just let you go to the next question after saying, and the reason why I’m so committed to that idea, uh, John, and I talk about this a little bit in my prior book is that I fully understand that as a white male born in the rural foothills of East Tennessee, but the reason why the state of Tennessee’s constitution mandates public education, the reason, why a poor kid like me got a decent shot in life is because the Friedman pushed this institution into existence. I understand that the reason I wrote this book, the reason why I found my way and undergraduate is because I actually undergraduate college is because I attended Clinton high school. Which was the first traditionally white high school in the South to graduate a Black student. So I am proud of that fact, right? So this legacy of Black freedom has changed me too and me for the better, right. And I think, you know, at least only in my own small mind, I do see that these ripple effects are enormous, but again, we’ve still got a lot more to achieve.
John McCaa [00:43:33] Yeah, you know, President Trump has recently signed an order in an effort to get rid of the Department of Education. And it looks like there are several in Congress who are going to help them try to do that. You, I clearly think, believe this is moving us in the wrong direction.
Derek W. Black [00:43:54] Yeah, I mean, look, when the nation was founded in 1776, a few years later, before we even had a United States Constitution, we had the Northwest ordinances that mandated that in all the rest of the territory in the country, every single town would be chopped up into 32 lots and the 16th lot would be reserved for public schools, right? So from the nation’s founding, there was this idea of public education as part of growing democracy. At the end of the Civil War, we have all these southern states, right. putting education in their constitution because the Freedmen wanted it, but also because Congress was demanding it as a condition of statehood. You know, move to our third birth of freedom and reconstruction of freedom in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, right? It was through our public schools and the federal government demanding integration that we entered a new era freedom in America. It has always been the federal government that has Yeah. Well, the federal government is far from perfect, but if we’re sort of picking who is the actor who has helped propel us forward to a more just, more equal set of schools, it has been the federal government. So the idea that somehow or another they are the problem strikes me as quite odd, number one, and number two on all these other issues, you know, what books are in the schools, right? What’s the teacher certification and qualifications? How much money are we going to spend per kid per year? All those decisions are made at the state level, have been made at the state-level. So when we talk about returning decisions to the states, I sadly say that there’s only one decision that’s still dominated by the federal government and that’s anti-discrimination. And I question why we would turn that anti- discrimination question over to the state.
John McCaa [00:45:44] Derek W. Black is the Ernest F. Harling’s Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He also directs the law school’s Constitutional Law Center. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.” Appreciate you being with us today.
Derek W. Black [00:46:02] Thanks so much, John, it’s been great.
John McCaa [00:46:04] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Once again, I’m John McCaa, filling in today for Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
