Bring your lunch to this free lecture and learn how education for black girls was necessary for social advancement in southern society. Literacy was recognized in the post-Civil War period as a means of subverting the white institutional belief that black girls had no right to access notions of domestic femininity and womanhood that governed white women during the 19th century. Through education, women defined themselves and their relationship to their family, community, and the larger civil society. By the mid-1880s, Baltimore’s black community demanded better access to education to teach black children self-sufficiency, independence and to participate in concepts of racial uplift, thus suggesting earlier local efforts with schooling and education in the antebellum period continued throughout the post-war period. Presentation given by Lord Baltimore Fellow Lisa Rose Lamson of Marquette University.