Black Reconstruction officials founded the American public school system

Evidence

These Black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North and believed that abolition would also expand the rights of white Americans, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodations, and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 150

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that the public school—America’s most democratic institution—was a Black Reconstruction achievement is a strong counterintuitive angle for an essay on institutional origins.
• XREF: Links to the reading purpose: the public school is a concrete ‘infrastructure’ origin story showing what a nation dates itself from. — connects to: The first US school for professional government work predated the modern civil service ethos. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 263