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out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in
those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue:
Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have
to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense
thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives
and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and
well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without
colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than
our own?
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks.
Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate.
Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the
National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites
can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you
think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as
much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone,
black or white, could read.
In their famous bestseller, The Bell Curve, prominent social analysts Charles Murray and Richard
Herrnstein say that what we’re seeing are the results of selective breeding in society. Smart people
naturally get together with smart people, dumb people with dumb people. As they have children
generation after generation, the differences between the groups gets larger and larger. That
sounds plausible and the authors produce impressive mathematics to prove their case, but their
documentation shows they are entirely ignorant of the military data available to challenge their
contention. The terrifying drop in literacy between World War II and Korea happened in a
decade, and even the brashest survival-of-the-fittest theorist wouldn’t argue evolution unfolds that
way. The Bell Curve writers say black illiteracy (and violence) is genetically programmed, but like
many academics they ignore contradictory evidence.
For example, on the matter of violence inscribed in black genes, the inconvenient parallel is to
South Africa where 31 million blacks live, the same count living in the United States. Compare
numbers of blacks who died by violence in South Africa in civil war conditions during 1989,
1990, and 1991 with our own peacetime mortality statistics and you find that far from exceeding
the violent death toll in the United States or even matching it, South Africa had proportionately
less than one-quarter the violent death rate of American blacks. If more contemporary
comparisons are sought, we need only compare the current black literacy rate in the United States
(56 percent) with the rate in Jamaica (98.5 percent)—a figure considerably higher than the
American white literacy rate (83 percent).
If not heredity, what then? Well, one change is indisputable, well-documented and easy to track.
During WWII, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching
reading. On the matter of violence alone this would seem to have impact: according to the Justice
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