Forged in slavery, education is the bellwether of African American aspirations and struggles for dignity, freedom, and equality.

Both enslaved and free blacks faced firm barriers to education. Laws barred educating slaves; free blacks had little or no opportunity to learn. There were a few “catechizing schools for Negroes,” begun in 1704, where clergy from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts taught English and Bible. Clergy also conducted worship on plantations, if masters agreed. During the Great Awakening revival (1730s–70s), some blacks received baptism and instruction in Sabbath or mission schools of Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and others. Slavery abolition in the post-Revolutionary North witnessed blacks forming separate churches, Sunday and Free African Schools, as many white schools excluded black children. Black teachers in African schools attended white colleges such as Oberlin (1832) or all-black Lincoln (1854) and Wilberforce (1856) universities. Nationally, by the Civil War, more than 90 percent of slaves and 50 percent of free blacks were illiterate.

The “first crusade” for black schools in the South began during the war. So-called “contraband” slaves fled to Union lines in large numbers, gaining aid, wage-labor, freedom, and military enlistment. Ex-slaves acquired spelling books and Bibles. formed Sabbath schools, and flocked to missionary teachers. Black teacher Mary Peake opened a school at Fort Monroe, Virginia in 1861; white missionaries Laura Towne and Ellen Murray started Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina in 1862. As the Thirteenth Amendment ended bondage and Freedmen's Bureau aided ex-slaves and white refugees, black schooling expanded. The Bureau oversaw hospitals, courts, landlord–tenant transactions, schools, as well as volunteers from charities, churches, and philanthropies. In 1868 alone the African Methodist Episcopal Church reported 40,000 Sabbath School pupils. The Bureau operated 3,000 schools before closing its operations in 1869. Reconstruction terminated in 1877 and states operated former Bureau Schools, which they neglected. So, sympathetic northern and southern whites helped provide Negro elementary, normal, and trade schools, besides collegiate institutions such as Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard Universities and Hampton Institute, to train ministers, teachers, and skilled workers.

From 1877 to 1901, blacks endured the nadir, “the lowest point in the quest for equal rights,” testing their capacity to sustain schools. Black educators advocated self-help while soliciting federal and philanthropic support, particularly appealing to northern philanthropists.