Current explanations for the gap between African-American and white school achievement are inadequate; most cannot explain the high level of black school achievement in the decade after Emancipation. Further, traditional accounts of the origins of educational discrimination against African-Americans are inaccurate. The roots of educational…

Access to education formed a substantial boundary in the slave-holding South prior to the American Civil War (1861-1865). After emancipation, African-Americans demanded full access to formal schooling as one symbol of their freedom, seeking thereby to redraw the region's social map. Three groups of teachers in the freed people's schools…

Slavery in the United States denied education to the enslaved. Yet within fifteen years of the beginning of the American Civil War and the freeing of four million American slaves, the freed people and their supporters elaborated a full system of universal education in the South, including over 120 secondary and higher institutions. Historians have…