One of the key ingredients of slavery was keeping the slaves “dumb,” and one of the easiest ways to do that was to prohibit slaves from reading. While white children may have attended school or had a private tutor, black children were used as slave labor in the fields, maid services in the house, or as a playmate for the white children. When laws were finally passed freeing my ancestors, many of them couldn’t even read the declarations. If you lived in an area where none of the black people had been stealthy enough to learn how to read, you were dependent on the slave owners (who lost a war fighting for the state’s right to keep you a slave) to relay this news. What kind of job or career can you cultivate without education? This could be why many freed blacks stuck with agriculture, and participated in sharecropping. Education was the focus of the legendary Mary McLeod-Bethune. It is important to see present day black people breaking barriers in spaces we have traditionally been unwelcome.

Let’s look at some context too. The Ivy League is considered to be the premiere set of institutions in the US. These schools are notoriously hard to get accepted to, have extremely powerful and wealthy alumni, and are associated with prestige. There are 8 universities in the Ivy League; the oldest of them is Harvard, founded in 1636 and the youngest is Cornell, founded in 1865. In 2001, when Dr. Simmons was sworn in as president of Brown, there had been

This means that it took 365 years and 135 presidents across all 8 schools, to select a black person as president.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Knowledge:

The original desire.

Power such to see

and understand

That which gives birth

To creation...

Choices and ideas,

Word strung together

To form newness

For better or worse.

A power to control

That which surrounds us

And stand.