For most of their history, colleges and universities in the United States served elites, and they did everything they could not to admit people from groups outside the mainstream. More recently, many of those same schools have changed course, trying to create diverse campuses that serve people of different races, ethnicities, and social classes. But now the Supreme Court has put a stop to some of these practices, ending affirmative action as we have known it. We in Higher Ed will adjust, but in making those adjustments, there are aspects of the past we should not forget. We should not forget that Black people in America, even when forced into slavery, have looked at education as a path to freedom – and that white supremacists, seeing education much the same way, have been bent on denying it to them.
We should be inspired by the fact that Black people enslaved in America found ways to teach one another even in the bleakest of conditions. So-called pit schools, for example, were places hidden from the overseer's gaze where slaves could teach one another reading and writing skills with whatever implements were at hand. Former slave and pioneering educator Harriet Jacobs underscored the connection between learning and freedom. In her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she gave harrowing accounts of white militias going through slave quarters looking for signs of literacy.
