Fashioned from a vast array of archival sources as well as secondary sources, newspapers, periodicals, family correspondence, and oral interviews, Politics, Disability, and Education Reform in the South: The Work of John Eldred Swearingen analyzes the political and educational contexts during which Swearingen fought to improve educational conditions for African-Americans, women, and the children of millworkers in South Carolina as State Superintendent of Education 1907-1922. Blinded in a hunting accident at 13, Swearingen became the first blind student admitted to the University of South Carolina, and became a successful teacher and politician. Fighting for equalized funding and desegregated schools put him in direct opposition with the Ku Klux Klan, the General Education Board, and Governor Coleman Blease. Swearingen's story lends itself to scholars of education and political science, as well as any reader with an interest in the intersections of race, gender, disability, politics and education.