The Widening Racial Gap in American Higher Education

The attainment of education for blacks in the United States has inauspicious origins in the early history of this country when enslaved Africans were forbidden by law to receive educational instruction. Although some masters allowed their slaves to learn to read and write, the vast majority of blacks were illiterate, a condition that continued through the nineteenth century. Emancipation resulted in the migration of many blacks to the North and black progress occurred in education as well as a number of other areas such as health and employment (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1979). The Bureau of the Census (1979) reports that this progress has continued through the twentieth century; however, the decade of the 1960s marked the most significant gains for