A century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Julian Bond observed in the 1970s that what passes for public education in the South has been a distressing and dehumanizing process for black children. Despite this indisputable fact, the black working rural poor, who cleaned the toilets, picked the cotton, logged the timber, cared for whites’ children, and cooked the meals of the white leisurely class, believed in educating their children. However, segregated public schools, even good ones with value-added teachers, were built sideways, to affirm the present rather than confront public dispossession. Still, they were, for many, places of heterogeneity, populated by blacks of all classes, aspirations, and hues, environments where Lonnie, Matthews, Clementine, and Williams and their children were poised to learn. Schoolmates whose parents were part of the tiny middle class, those whose parents were among the ambitious working class, and the teachers who believed in and challenged them, as best they were able, to orient children’s imaginations toward the future. Some individuals and organizations worked to support these aspirations.