Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism

Before the founding of the United States, enslaved Africans advocated literacy as a method of emancipation. During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, blacks were at the forefront of the debates on the establishment of public schools in the South. In fact, a wealth of ideas about the role of education in American freedom and progress emerged from African American civic, political, and religious communities and was informed by the complexity of the Black experience in America.

Edu...