Louisiana’s CRT Ban Continues the Long History Suppressing Black Education

Landry claimed teaching about systemic racism is ​“divisive,” asserting that students should instead learn about ​“American exceptionalism,” and in a news release declared that ​“teaching children that they are currently or destined to be oppressed … is wrong.” 

This rhetoric of ​“divisiveness” is not new. Throughout history, those in power have labeled antiracist pedagogy and the education of Black people as dangerous and inflammatory. 

“Black education was a fugitive project from its inception,” writes historian Jarvis Givens, ​“outlawed and defined as a criminal act regarding the slave population in the southern states and, at times, too, an object of suspicion and violent resistance in the North.”

This history of the suppression of Black education — and Black people’s persistent struggle for liberatory education — recently came into sharp focus for me in a deeply personal way. My father, Gerald Lenoir, made a remarkable discovery while tracing the roots of our family history. In a county courthouse in Mississippi, he found documents that my enslaved great-great-great-grandfather, Caleb Ratcliff, and his daughter, Laura Lenoir, signed their names to after the Civil War. At a time when many formerly enslaved people, denied literacy, often had to sign with an ​“X,” Caleb and Laura boldly wrote their names, defying the barriers that sought to silence them.

Given that literacy was illegal for enslaved people, it’s possible that Caleb and Laura secretly learned how to read and write — despite the law specifying severe beatings for Black people caught being literate. Alternatively, they may have acquired literacy during Reconstruction, a time when Black educators led an incredible movement to create the public school system in the South. Regardless of how they learned to write, Caleb and Laura’s commitment to education was passed down to my great-grandfather, York Alonzo Lenoir, who went on to attend Alcorn State University and become an educator himself.

York married Ivy Anita Darensbourg, a teacher and poet from Louisiana, and together they started schools in Louisiana and Mississippi. Just one generation removed from slavery, York and Ivy became beacons of hope, using education to uplift Black communities.

It’s this legacy Landry is trying to erase.

The roots of struggle for Black education stretch back to the earliest days of slavery in the Americas. As Angela Davis explains, ​“Historically, you might argue that Black people in this country value education more than anything else, precisely because they understood its connection with freedom. There can be no liberation without education.”

During the Stono Rebellion of 1739, enslaved Africans in South Carolina rose up in pursuit of their freedom and marched with a banner that simply read: ​“Liberty.” The colony responded by passing the ​“Negro Act of 1740” — the first anti-literacy law, passed out of fear that literacy had contributed to the rebelliousness of Black people.

These laws proliferated throughout the South. The Georgia Act of 1829 made it illegal to circulate abolitionist materials, specifically targeting David Walker’s An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which boldly called for enslaved people to rise up against their oppressors. Walker wrote, ​“For colored people to acquire learning in this country, makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sand foundation.” On December 11, 1829, in Savannah, Georgia, police seized sixty copies of the Appeal. Ten days after the confiscation, the legislature — in addition to a ban on teaching any ​“slave, negro or free person of colour” to read — passed a law requiring the punishment of Black people, or anyone else, who brought into Georgia ​“any printed or written pamphlet, paper of circular, for the purposes of exciting to insurrection, conspiracy or resistance among the slaves, negros, or free persons of color.”

Laws attacking Black education were also enacted in the North. In 1833, for example, Connecticut passed a ​“Black Law” specifically targeting antiracist educators like Prudence Crandall by making it illegal to operate schools for Black students from other states.

This history reveals a pattern: every time Black people make significant educational gains or achieve victories in ourbroader struggles for freedom, there is a corresponding backlash aimed at curbing those advances. It happened when enslaved people used the written word to inspire rebellions. It happened during the Civil Rights Era, when Virginia’s Textbook Commission promoted the Lost Cause narrative — a revisionist interpretation that romanticized the horrors of slavery and white supremacist terror during Reconstruction — and some of the state’s counties even went as far as shutting down all their public schools in defiance of Brown v. Board of Education. It happened in the wake of the 2020 uprising for Black lives when, in 2021, Iowa became the first state to ban teaching about systemic racism, with similar laws proliferating throughout the country since. Today’s officials in Louisiana and other history deniers across the country who attack Black history and antiracist education may not be able to hear themselves in the 1830 Louisiana law that criminalized ​“whosoever shall write, print, publish or distribute any thing having a tendency to produce discontent among the free colored population of the state, or insubordination among the slaves therein.”

But if you read a recent statement published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, you can hear the echo: ​“CRT scholarship on teaching methods is also used to advocate activism. … Curricular content for action civics range from encouraging students to volunteer in their community to suggesting that teachers assign students, even elementary-age students, material that advocates for unionizing workers and protesting against ​‘gentrification,’ complex subjects even for adults to consider.” The fear in both statements is clear: Learning could lead to dissatisfaction with existing conditions, which could, in turn, lead to antiracist action.

The legacy of my ancestors, who risked everything for the right to learn, compels me – and should compel all of us — to continue the struggle today. Landry’s decree that students only be allowed to learn about ​“American exceptionalism” is an anodyne telling of history where the United States was delivered by the stork — and he would rather youth not look any further into how the country was made, lest it offend delicate sensibilities. 

But the truth is far messier, and far more powerful. The real story of America is one of struggle and resistance, of dreams deferred and fought for, of a nation built on the backs of those it oppressed, yet also shaped by their unyielding demand for justice. It is only by confronting this truth, in all its complexity and contradiction, that we can hope to build a future worthy of those who came before us, and those who will come after. 

The attack on Black education is an attempt to silence the voices of those whose words could change the world. My great-grandmother Ivy, just one generation removed from slavery, possessed a gift for poetry — a gift that could have been lost if anti-literacy laws had not been struck down. Her words speak to the resilience and power of Black educators. In her poem ​“A Little Child Shall Lead Them,” she wrote:

In spite of racial tensions,

intolerance, and greed,
a child’s love exploded

and made clear a human need.

Her poem reminds us of the beauty and truth that education can unlock, and of the critical importance of protecting the right to learn — for the love, justice, and humanity we all need.