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EDUCATIONAL CRISIS                                     BOND
dominantly accepted by them; so, events and institutions and the name of the people to 1831, will be designated as African; from 1831 to 1880, as Colored; from 1880, to 1960, as Negro; and events since 1960, and, presumptively, for the future, as affecting the "black," or "Afro-American" people. 
Another set of circumstances that needs to be considered has to do with the varied kinds of social stratification that have characterized this population throughout its history in the United States. From the first appearance of African in the new world, a privileged class, whose educational expectations and attainments and access to education to differed widely from the majority of this population, began to appear. This class was made up of free people. Of the 757,808 Africans enumerated in the first decennial census in 1790, 59,577 or 7.19 per cent, were free. By 1840, the 386,293 free "colored" were 13.1 per cent of the entire number of persons of African descend in the United States. We continue to talk about the "four million" slaves Lincoln is said to have emancipated in 1863; this was an approximation, and leaves out of our vision the 488,070-or 10.4 per cent of the total population of 4,441,130 of African descent, that was free in 1860. The census figures of antebellum period give no reports on the literacy of the slaves; but the literacy rates of the free colored people were reported, and show that the literacy of the "free colored" people was astonishingly close to the figures reported for the white population. The educational institutions for this population were markedly inferior to those provided for the white population; but the evidence shows that there was a very substantial number of literate persons to leaven the mass of the former slaves, for whom formal education had been legally proscribed before emancipation.
One needs, finally, to understand the structure of American education during the various periods during which the designations described above were developed. It was not until the 1820's, and even afterward, that the principle of universal, free, tax supported and publicly controlled elementary education was established in Northern and Western States; in the South, even for white children, the establishment of the principle, and a legal and constitutional structure to match it, had to wait until the post-Civil War reconstruction period. During the "African" period, the education of African children had to be conducted in private schools; for the most part, in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, these children were educate in separate, private schools, dubbed 

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