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