Primary Sources: How Black People Invented America's Education System
...And why the people who hate DEI, affirmative action and an educated population have always wanted to destroy it.
Instead of untold stories from Black history, ContrabandCamp’s Primary Sources series shares pure, uncut and rarely told stories from the past straight from the primary source.
Some stories don’t need whitewashing.
On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, two weeks before a law requiring all white men to carry firearms to church went into effect, a literate enslaved Angolan warrior named Jemmy gathered about 20 of his enslaved countrymen on the banks of the Stono River outside of Charleston, S.C., and began killing white people.
“Colonel Bull” was not just a soldier. On May 10, 1740, Gov. William Bull signed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province, which included this provision to protect the public from literate enslaved people like Jemmy:
“And whereas, the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences; Be it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid, That all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereinafter teach or cause any slave or slaves to be taught, to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such person and persons, shall, for every such offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds current money.”
The Negro Act of 1740 codified white supremacy and served as the template for how every colony governed the enslaved. And because it was filed as property law, it also determined how the architects of the U.S. Constitution legally regarded enslaved people:
“The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character.
Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants.'“
Some historians claim Massachusetts was the first to guarantee every citizen a public education. However, Chapter V, Section II of the 1780 state constitution only directs the state government to protect or “cherish” education.
“…it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country.”
Even before the state outlawed slavery, the Massachusetts colony passed a “Warning Out” law, which allowed towns to exclude Black citizens from public institutions.
Every time a rebellion happened, whites blamed it on the enslaved people’s ability to read.
And because, as everyone knows, an educated negro is the most dangerous kind, anti-literacy laws didn’t just apply to the enslaved. Educating free Black people was also illegal.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, the Confederate states had to rewrite their state constitutions to gain reentry into the Union. And because of the recently passed 13th and 14th Amendments, South Carolina’s “radical” constitutional delegation reflected the state’s Black majority.
So when these “radical” Black men gathered to rewrite the state Constitution in 1868, even South Carolina’s white governor knew that education was their primary concern.
These Black radicals came up with two ideas:
First, they wrote a letter asking the federal government to create a special department of the U.S. government called the “Bureau of Education.”
Then they got really radical. Some states and counties had tax laws that funded schools. Others had passed laws that guaranteed white children the right to an education. The idea of school districts governed by a democratically elected state superintendent wasn’t exactly new. But no state had included this detailed structure in its constitution until the Black people of South Carolina created what would eventually serve as the template for the American education system. But when S.C.’s 1868 constitutional convention concluded, the majority-Black delegation had created a perpetual opportunity machine that had never existed. Or as Michael Boulware Moore described it:
The “first, free, compulsory, statewide public school system in America.”
More than a decade before white America concocted a system called Jim Crow, South Carolina’s Black founders had the foresight to ensure that Black children would never attend segregated schools.
It even protected students from underfunded schools, right-wing Christianity and political ideology:
Powerless to stop the progress, in less than eight years, white terrorists across the South would burn these institutions to the ground.
They didn’t want us to have one. So, Black people built their own. But, contrary to popular belief, the U.S. school system was neither separate nor equal. By 1928, one-third of Black children in the rural South were educated at Rosenwald schools, institutions built, staffed and funded through a combination of community fundraising and philanthropy.
Meanwhile, Black taxpayers were funding the schools that Black children could not attend. The parents worked all year to fund the public colleges and K-12 schools that excluded their children. In 1951, a group of Black families from S.C. filed a civil rights case called Briggs v Elliot. By the time it reached the Supreme Court, it was combined with four later cases that became known as Brown v. Board of Education. Briggs initially had nothing to do with segregation. They just wanted their money.
70 years after Brown v. Board, even the poorest white school districts get more funding than the richest majority Black neighborhoods ...
Imagine whining about affirmative action, DEI and CRT when you have a $23 billion advantage.
The Black founding fathers who invented our education system would have never allowed this. They believed in God but did not want religion in their government and their schools. They always knew the country needed a Department of Education.
The white people did not.
The people who had all the power, opportunity and liberty said they “cherished” education but did not create a system to share it. They knew education was Black people’s greatest desire but were so afraid of Black equality and freedom that they withheld it from everyone.
And now we are allowing the people who banned it to destroy it again. We are taking advice on the education system from the people who criminalized, segregated and underfunded it. Not the Confederates. Not the Southerners. Not the Christians. Not the Republicans. Not the Democrats. Not the liberals or conservatives …
White people.
The goal is the same as always — to use our tax dollars to build their institutions and their generational wealth while they are “warning out” the Black people who want the education we paid for.
They only say they “cherish” it. But we are the ones who built it. As with democracy, equality and America, we are the ones who fought to make it equal for everyone. And when it comes to education in America …
We are the primary source.
Why is this not surprising? The genius of black people is nutritious to the soul.
This post is more evidence that Black folks have been shining a guiding light since the beginning while White resentment and envy sabotages and undermines everyone, even them. Our foresight, inventiveness, and intelligence must be a powerful threat.