Opinion: The Education Department’s forgotten antiracist origins

After the Civil War, many intellectuals believed that illiteracy among Southerners who did not own slaves had allowed them to be swindled by the South’s slaveholding aristocracy. “This ignorance,” one prominent educator said in 1865, “enabled the rebel leaders to create prejudice” and induce uneducated people to support rebellion. Reconstruction presented the country’s educators with an opportunity: They could in one stroke standardize a hodgepodge of different educational structures nationwide, address the illiteracy of white Southerners and educate millions of newly freed slaves.

In December 1865, one Republican congressman introduced a resolution that would create a new government agency to “enforce education without regard to color.” Two years later , the nation’s first Departme