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Issues of race and schooling would only become more urgent in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Civil War ended in 1865. Four million Americans, formerly slaves, were now free. As Vanessa Siddle Walker comments, “There wasn’t anybody too old or too young that didn’t feel as though he or she couldn’t benefit from some level of schooling and it was seen as the most valuable undertaking-the notion of going to school.”
…Despite hardship, black literacy soared in the decades after the Civil War, from 5 percent to 70 percent.
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