Although North Carolina had laws until the mid-19th century preventing captive or free Blacks from learning to read or write, Black education from that period through the early 20th century was on the rise as students exercised a sincere yearning to learn and expand their educational futures. John W. Alvord, general superintendent of schools for the Freedmen's Bureau, reported in 1865 that in the South, "an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves." The following year, he noted their "surprising efforts" to obtain an education were "not spasmodic;" rather, it was "growing to a habit." That habit, or preoccupation as John Hope Franklin points out in From Slavery to Freedom, was the "greatest single opportunity to escape the increasing proscriptions and indignities that a renascent South was heaping upon the Negroes." The South wanted to return to the reality that existed before the Civil War, but Blacks weren't going to comply. Franklin posits that Black parents wanted their children to have "a portion of the learning they had been denied." North Carolina was prime for such learning to take place in the generation following Reconstruction because there was increased interest in the state to produce more teachers to match student enthusiasm.

In a 1927 study published in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, W.E.B. Dubois declared that "for the Southern states, North Carolina is without doubt the best." Simon Green Atkins, the founder of what is now Winston-Salem State University, once wrote to his board of trustees of the "paramount importance" of teachers being trained properly. In his 1926 annual report, Atkins wrote that they needed to "as far as possible prepare to train completely our own teachers and leaders, and that we offer right here in our State to the young Negro candidate for teaching and leadership facilities as good as are offered elsewhere."

Atkins was referring to a teacher pipeline that would serve the youth in primary and secondary schools, and in Winston-Salem, that included institutions like 14th Street School and eventually the "Big Four" high schools: Anderson, Atkins, Carver, and Paisley. That pipeline came to fruition in Winston-Salem and across the state as the educators became highly trained, according to their credentials and former students. Wayne Ledbetter, Anderson High School class of 1970, said he believes many forget the level of educators that were present: "I think a lot of people miss that."

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