Students at a Freedmen’s School in Virginia, ca. 1870s “The people are hungry and thirsty after knowledge,” a former slave observed immediately after the Civil War. African American leader Booker T. Washington remembered “a whole race trying to go to school.” Students at this Virginia school stand in front of their log-cabin classroom reading books. For people long forbidden to learn to read and write, literacy symbolized freedom. Cook Collection, Valentine Richmond History Center, www.richmondhistorycenter.com.