Black Reconstruction legislators created the South’s public school system

Evidence

Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed Black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education, which they saw as integral to true liberty. So Black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools—not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, Black and white, were now required to attend schools, the way their Northern counterparts did. Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of Black and white children, briefly, attended schools together. Remarkably, in 1873 the University of South Carolina became the only state-sponsored college in the South to fully integrate, becoming majority Black—just like the state itself—by 1876. (When white former Confederates regained power a year later, they closed the university. After three years, they reopened it as an all-white institution; it would remain that way for nearly a century, until a court-ordered desegregation in 1963.) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 151

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s known claim that origin stories are infrastructure — public schooling is a later American institution whose origin is Black agency, not white benevolence.
• QUESTION: How does the standard high-school history narrative erase Black legislators’ authorship of Southern public schools? Worth checking which textbooks credit whom.