Sotomayor, J., dissenting
protected. The Constitution initially limited the power of Congress to restrict the slave trade, Art. I, §9, cl. 1, accorded Southern States additional electoral power by counting three-fifths of their enslaved population in apportioning congressional seats, §2, cl. 3, and gave enslavers the right to retrieve enslaved people who escaped to free States, Art. IV, §2, cl. 3. Because a foundational pillar of slavery was the racist notion that Black people are a subordinate class with intellectual inferiority, Southern States sought to ensure slavery’s longevity by prohibiting the education of Black people, whether enslaved or free. See H. Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom 7, 203–213 (2005) (Self-Taught). Thus, from this Nation’s birth, the freedom to learn was neither colorblind nor equal.
With time, and at the tremendous cost of the Civil War, abolition came. More than two centuries after the first African enslaved persons were forcibly brought to our shores, Congress adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished “slavery” and “involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.” §1. “Like all great historical transformations,” emancipation was a movement, “not a single event” owed to any single individual, institution, or political party. E. Foner, The Second Founding 21, 51–54 (2019) (The Second Founding).
The fight for equal educational opportunity, however, was a key driver. Literacy was an “instrument of resistance and liberation.” Self-Taught 8. Education “provided the means to write a pass to freedom” and “to learn of abolitionist activities.” Id., at 7. It allowed enslaved Black people “to disturb the power relations between master and slave,” which “fused their desire for literacy with their desire for freedom.” Ibid. Put simply, “[t]he very feeling of inferiority which slavery forced upon [Black people] fathered an intense desire to rise out of their condition by means of education.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
