Little Lady Can Read

Little Lady Can Read. March Route for Education. Immediately after the Civil War, Northern church groups funded by sympathetic Whites rushed to the South to start elementary schools and colleges to educate freed slaves. Soon afterward, Blacks took the lead in educating their own children. African Americans did the best they could to educate their children despite limited resources. They begged White public school officials for equal funding for their schools, often without success. Birmingham's civic leaders believed that educated Blacks made better servants and workers in the city's industries. So they tended to spend more money on urban Negro schools than their rural counterparts spent. Despite the unequal funding for their schools, most black parents took their children's education very seriously. , Paired marker , 1942 , Blacks believed education and moral instruction were the best ways to lift their race above its inferior place in a segregated society. Thus, they highly respected teachers and preachers. In the early 1900s, Birmingham's churches pooled their resources to start some of the city's first Black schools. Because many of these schools stopped at the 7th grade, Rev. William Pettiford, pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, led a group of Black middle-class parents to ask the Birmingham Board of Education to build the city's first Negro high school. Industrial High School opened in 1901. Even with limited resources, Black parents and teachers believed that a good education was a most important goal. Pictured here, a little girl reads to her peers in a segregated classroom. Equal education would become a key demand for leaders of Birmingham's Civil Rights Movement. , "Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom." , George Washington Carver , African American scientist, inventor and educator at Tuskegee Institute., Lesson D3: What would you do to improve the conditions of your school if your school had unequal resources?