African Americans faced great disadvantages in education, beginning during slavery when it was illegal for them to read or write, into the era of Jim Crow, when they were forbidden to attend school with white children. Separate schools, common after the Civil War, were legalized in the late 19th Century. Schools and facilities for black students rarely equaled those for white. The cramped, unheated rooms often lacked water, plumbing, textbooks, paper or other teaching supplies