How Laws Against Black Literacy Continue to Impact Education Systems

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How Laws Against Black Literacy Continue to Impact Education Systems

The push for universal public education across the United States began in the midst of the Civil War — on the Union-occupied Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. There, thousands of Black children began going to schools built expressly for them, where they learned to read and write after decades of laws against Black literacy. The Sea Islands’ experiment, as it was known, marked a positive moment in the fraught history of Black education…