In Teaching Equality, Adam Fairclough provides an overview of the enormous contributions made by African American teachers to the black freedom movement in the United States. Beginning with the close of the Civil War, when “the efforts of the slave regime to prevent black literacy meant that blacks . . . associated education with liberation,” Fairclough explores the development of educational ideals in the black community up through the years of the civil rights movement. He reveals the complicated lives of these educators who, in the face of a prejudice-based social order and a history of oppression, sustained and inspired the minds and hearts of generations of black Americans.