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What is little known is that it is freedmen and women who brought public education to the South. It is black Reconstruction legislatures that insisted a right to public education be put into the new constitutions required for Southern states to be readmitted to the Union.
*legislators
Prior to that, the white Southern elite had resisted public education even as universal free common schools were exploding across the South. The white elite did not believe in paying for poor white people's children to go to school or in a common good.
Prior to Reconstruction, most white Southern children did not attend schools. The few who did were actually attending schools with BLACK kids started by black people. Imagine that.
But black legislators were not vengeful. They pushed initiatives and laws to universalize dignity, to raise tax dollars to fund public schools for all, and to make school attendance compulsory.
Consider the sad irony that in the Great Nadir that followed the end of Reconstruction they would be starved of the very public education that they'd brought to the South, while white children reaped the benefits. America.
**Exploding across the NORTH, not the SOUTH. Sorry!
So, whenever you hear this most pernicious and constant stereotype that black Americans don't value education, STOMP IT OUT. It is a lie. It has always been a lie. It is the same lie that has forever been used to justify our segregated and unequal schools.
