Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 142.0

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

3 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

protected.  The Constitution initially limited the power of 
Congress  to  restrict  the  slave  trade,  Art. I,  §9,  cl. 1,  ac-
corded Southern States additional electoral power by count-
ing 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 Af-
rican enslaved persons were forcibly brought to our shores, 
Congress adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Con-
stitution, which abolished “slavery” and “involuntary servi-
tude, except as a punishment for crime.”  §1.  “Like all great
historical  transformations,”  emancipation  was  a  move-
ment, “not a single event” owed to any single individual, in-
stitution, 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 abolition-
ist 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  in-
tense desire to rise out of their condition by means of edu-
cation.”  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America