Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, Beloved, is a ghost story that forces readers to confront America's legacy of slavery--of racism, subjugation, and murder--and consider how it still haunts us today. One Virginia mother's quixotic bid to remove the book from her school district's Advanced Placement English curriculum indirectly led to the election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Education's move to the forefront of modern culture war politics has a great deal to do with Beloved.

Morrison drew inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved black woman who fled her plantation in 1856. When slave catchers caught her, she killed her...