Equality in Eduacation

Going grocery shopping, taking medicine, filling out applications are task Americans do everyday. However, can you imagine not being able to do these things all because you cannot read and/or write? Or can you imagine being told that because of your skin tone you are incapable of learning? Illiteracy was also used as a trap because it is known that education is freedom and not being about to read and write was just another leash to keep slaves and other African Americans in captivity. All before W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington, there were people, African Americans dying and getting beaten because they wanted to learn. Seeking books from the Masters' homes, and having to learn behind closed doors. Then, even as times changed and they were permitted to learn. Most of the African American children had to drop out to help support their families. However, nowadays there schools are pressing the issues that "No Child Should Be Left Behind" and that slogan doesn't just apply to a certain race or ethnicity. Being that school/college are more diverse and everyone is getting the chance to learn the illiteracy rate among African Americans has decreased tremendously since the 1800s to now.

One of the foremost uses of the laws prohibiting literacy was to help further the stereotypes of the mid nineteenth century. It was then vital to the institution of slavery to keep the entire black race uneducated, because it would pose all too much of a risk for any black person to be able to organize against slavery. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. This specific declaration demonstrates not only the oppression of the minds of slaves, but of free blacks as well. Foner explains the Negro Convention Movement, or the broadening education of blacks as inevitable that this development would lead to a realization among the Negro people that their ultimate victory lay in an integrated program representing a national viewpoint.

Hearing his master's justification for repressing the black mind led Douglass to realize the importance of literacy as the gateway to freedom. Through decades of cruelty, the spirit of the African American mind was almost entirely broken to fit a mold of the least resistance.

The United States of America has always stood as the land of opportunity, the land of equality; however, the African American journey toward cultural equality has been a complex and laborious one that still continues today. The passing of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in the second half of the 19th century did not instantly bring about equal rights and liberties. Instead, the country remained solidly divided upon racial lines, which favored white people, and were only solidified with Supreme Court decisions, and the individual states' endorsement of the Jim Crow laws. However, not all African Americans believed the answer to equality was in desegregation. W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), believed that the current "separate but equal" policies could be used for the advancement of the community as a whole, and integrating the schools would only have a negative impact on black children's educations. He asserted that the best way for blacks to hope to achieve equality with other Americans would be through concentrated pursuit of the equal portion of the clause. In the 1950's DuBois' own N.A.A.C.P. took on the Plessy decision articulating that "To endure bad schools and wrong educations because the schools are Ð''mixed' is a costly if not fatal mistake" (DuBois)