In Michelle Obama’s Bowie State University Commencement Speech, she talks about the school itself and how it came to be the amazing university it is today, also how hard it was for African Americans to receive an education. Before the Emancipation Proclamation it was illegal for African Americans to receive an education. It was extremely rare for a slave to know how to read and write and if they ever were caught, they would have been thrown in jail or beaten senseless. A few years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Bowie State University was founded and thrived helping African Americans, by giving them an education and the freedom to do so. All around the eastern shore, people burned schools down, smashed windows, sent death threats
