Education and financial independence were preached as the only Black avenue to freedom.

Evidence

In addition to their successful businesses, Elmore and Bertha Mae had seven children. He sent his two oldest sons to live with their aunt in Montgomery during the week so they could attend school in the city instead of going to the local high school, where the focus was on working the land rather than book learning. “Our father decided that those schools offered a better education,” McCall says of her dad, who never learned to read or write. He always preached to his children that getting a good education and achieving financial independence were the only ways Black folks would ever experience any kind of freedom. He had very little of the former but was dead set on grabbing up as much of the latter as he could. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 886

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader 1619 reframing: economic self-determination as resistance, tying to the reader’s case study of how Black enterprise clashed with the established racial order.