accepted them anyway). Here we see education as a
significant weapon used in a war against slavery and racial injustice.
Southern slave owners denied education to slaves in order to establish
and maintain their subjection. Northern politicians denied funds for
universities to Confederate, slave-owning states in order to establish
and maintain their subjection, their inability to train a workforce able
to respond to infrastructural crises that debilitated both rural and urban
life in the South.
Following the Civil War, it would take until 1890 for Congress to
pass a second Morrill Act, again emphasizing science, discovery, and
specialization, and allotting cash (not public land) for Southern states
to establish legally recognized "land grant" colleges, as long as those
Southern states could prove that their admission standards were not
based on race, or they established separate colleges for freed slaves (what
would become HBCUs). These land grant universities were tuition-free,
supplemented by the states that established them, and open to all citizens
willing to learn a trade that would relieve the country's infrastructural
crises.