How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

“I can tell you the thing that affected me most was that as I got old enough to go to school, you could not go to school if you were Black—‘colored,’ they called us then—until you were six. And you had to start in the pre-primer and primer, meaning you were eight years old getting into first grade. Which means that if you followed all the way through their program, passing each year, you would finish tenth grade at eighteen,” he told me, rocking back and forth in his chair. “And that was all the education they had for Blacks in the county …You would finish tenth grade at eighteen and be ready to work on the farm. And if you were industrious, they would hire you to clean the courthouse.” My grandfather was a bookish child, and many people, Black and white alike, took notice. He told me that a couple of the white women in town “learned that I was an avid reader, and they started leaving the Saturday Evening Post and Time magazine and all kinds of books and magazines like that on their back porch.”