A white, female, high school Advanced Placement English teacher in South Carolina was reprimanded when students in one of her classes and parents protested to the local school board that she had assigned “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates to the class to read. The book examines what it means to be Black in America. According to Education Week, South Carolina is one of 18 states that have restricted education about race since 2021. A Washington Post survey found that at least half the country now has laws that limit instruction on race, history, sex or gender identity.
Students in the AP English class were all-white. The students who complained emailed school board officials that the book and an accompanying video made them feel ashamed to be White, a violation of a South Carolina law forbidding teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race. One student wrote that reading the book was like “reading hate propaganda towards white people.”
The teacher believed that College Board AP English curriculum supported her decisions. It says that “Issues that might, from particular social, historical, or cultural viewpoints, be considered controversial, including references to ethnicities, nationalities, religions, races, dialects, gender, or class, may be addressed in texts that are appropriate for the AP English Language and Composition course.” In addition, Wood assigned a speech by former president Donald Trump to provide students with an alternative point of view and the English department chair signed off on the teacher’s use of the Coates’s book. The YouTube videos that the teacher showed the class to illustrate Coates’ arguments, “Systematic Racism Explained” and “The Unequal Opportunity Race” were very mild fact-based cartoons.
School administrators ordered the teacher, Mary Wood. to stop teaching the lesson and placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. At school board meetings and in online Facebook groups people demanded that she be fired. A Republican member of the state legislature spoke at the June school board meeting and denounced Wood as a “lawbreaker.” Wood was also denounced on rightwing media outlets for “race-shaming” white people.
The Washington Post was able to access some of the student emails to the school board complaining about the Coates assignment. Another student emailed: “I feel, to an extent, betrayed by Mrs Woods. I feel like she has built up this idea of expanding our mind through the introduction of controversial topics all year just to try to subtly indoctrinate our class.” According to this student, especially troublesome was Coates’ statement, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
I thought it would be helpful to provide South Carolina teachers with a timeline of the state’s racist past they could use to prepare lessons, not to make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” or “ashamed to be Caucasian,” but so that students understand the history of the United States and South Carolina and its impact on the world today. There are no opinions here, just disturbing facts.
Timeline of Racist South Carolina
1708: Enslaved Africans were a majority of the population in the British colony. Slave labor fueled rice and indigo plantations. Blacks remained the majority of the population of South Carolina into the 20th century.
1739: The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt in the Southern colonies. Twenty-five white colonists and 50 enslaved Africans were killed. colonial South.
1740: In response to the Stono Rebellion, the colonial legislature passes the Negro Act of 1740. It made it illegal for enslaved Africans to move about freely, congregate in groups, grow their own food, earn money, or learn to write and slaveholders were authorized to murder slaves they considered rebellious. The Negro Act remained in effect until the end of the American Civil War.
1808: South Carolina was the last remaining state to permit the importation of enslaved people. It was the only state where a majority of the legislators were slaveholders.
1820: The manumission law of 1820 virtually prevented the emancipation of enslaved Africans.
1822: Denmark Vesey organized a plan for thousands of enslaved people in the Charleston area to participate in an armed uprising to gain freedom. After the plot was uncovered thirty-five rebels were hanged including Vesey.
1830: 85% of inhabitants of Low Country rice plantations were enslaved people
1835: The Charleston Postmaster refused to deliver abolitionist mail. A South Carolina Congressman succeeded in getting Congress to ban petitions for ending slavery from being introduced.
1856: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks attacks and nearly murders Congressman Charles Sumner for protesting actions by pro-slavery forces in Kansas.
1860: The population of South Carolina was 703,620; 57% were enslaved Africans. South Carolina was the first state to secede after the election of Abraham Lincoln.
1861: Attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor starts the Civil War.
1865: The Black 54th Massachusetts marched through Charleston after the South surrendered.
1868: Red Shirts, a white paramilitary group, use intimidation and violence against Black voters to disrupts elections.
1871: President Grant declared martial law in nine South Carolina counties because of Klan activity. 600 Klansmen were jailed, 200 arrestees were indicted, 53 pleaded guilty, and five were convicted of terrorism.
1895: A new state constitution effectively disenfranchises Black voters. Only 15,000 of the 140,000 eligible Blacks qualified to register.
1919: “Red Summer” anti-Black race riot in Charleston. Three Black men died of gunshot wounds.
1940: The 1895 constitution limited African American voters to 3,000, less than 1% of those of eligible to vote.
1944: A 14-year-old Black youth, was accused of murdering two white girls. He was beaten until he confessed, tried and convicted by an all-white jury, and executed. In 2014, his conviction was overturned because his constitutional rights were violated and his confession was coerced.
1946: Isaac Woodward, an African-American World War II veteran wearing his uniform, was forcibly removed from a bus and beaten and blinded by police officers.
1954: Sarah Mae Flemming refused to give up her seat in a white’s only section of a bus. Later, when she tried to exit she was assaulted by the bus driver.
1956: U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond authored the Southern Manifesto denouncing the 1954 Brown v. Board decision as "unwarranted" called anti-segregationists "agitators and troublemakers invading our States."
1959: Jackie Robinson was ordered by police to leave a white’s only waiting room at the Greenville, South Carolina airport. Robinson refused.
1960: Eight African American students protesting segregation in the Greenville County public library system were arrested.
1961: Nine Black college students held a sit-in at a Rock Hill lunch counter.
1963: Over 1,000 white students at the University of South Carolina protested against integration of the school and burned a cross on the campus mall.
1963-1975: Over 200 white academies were established after courts ordered the integration of public schools.
1963: In response to the court ordered desegregation of public parks, the South Carolina Forestry Commission closed the state’s parks.
1968. Police opened fire on protesting Black students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, killing three and injuring twenty-eight.
1972: The Springfield Baptist Church in Greenville was burned in opposition to African American equality.
2015: Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist murdered nine African Americans attending bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
2022: Brittany Martin was sentenced to four years in prison for yelling at a police officer you "better be ready to die for the blue. I'm ready to die for the black" at a Black Lives Matter rally. Martin was pregnant at the time of the incident.
2022: South Carolina’s state legislature passed new election restrictions in a state that was already one of the most difficult places to vote in the country.
2023: 22 South Carolinians arrested on charges stemming from the insurrection riot at the U.S.