Most Southern communities provided no public high school for Black children until the 1930s

Evidence

Making school segregation illegal did nothing to repay Black families for the theft of their educations or make up for the loss to generations of Black Americans, many of them still living, who could never go to college because white officials believed that only white students needed a high school education and so refused to operate high schools for Black children. As late as the 1930s, most communities in the South, where the vast majority of Black Americans lived, failed to provide a single public high school for Black children, according to The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, by the historian James D. Anderson. Heavily Black Richmond County in Georgia, for instance, did not provide a four-year Black high school from 1897 to 1945. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Civil War/Jim Crow origin-story argument — public high school denial is concrete evidence of the ‘no restitution for stolen education’ claim. — connects to: No southern black public school offered high school by 1910 — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 279