A pox upon education restriction!

After the Civil War, the new, unified government tried to make things better in the South. They tried to give black people the right to vote, and civil rights, and all that good stuff. And for the most part, they did. Then they made one crucial mistake. They left. They picked up their military, and left the blacks and the whites in a tense racial relationship that was about to blow shy high.

With the lack of military occupation, things went downhill pretty fast. The whites were left in control, and they were pretty bitter about the recent turn of events. They took it upon themselves to make the lives of the black people around them Hell, by establishing a series of laws now call the Jim Crow laws. They made it pretty much impossible for black people to get a halfway decent education. Then they made all sorts of laws (coughvotingcough) that were pretty much based of how much education people recieved. This effectively crippled the black's newfound freedom.

Beyond the Jim Crow laws, new orginizations (coughKKKcough) sprung up, who took it upon themselves to "punish" those who'd took it upon themselves to make their lives better. They burnt crosses, beat people up, and hanged people for wanting nothing more than an education. It turned into something like homegrown terrorism for quite a while. People were so scared about retaliation from these groups that they decided for the time being, ignorance was okay. So segregation began.

Currently, there's something kinda similar going on overseas. In China, the government is very uptight about how much knowledge the public has. They have firewalls placed all over the Internet, keeping their people behind closed doors and in the dark. People could probably write proxy codes for a living over there. (They might already, who knows?)

They also don't like the spread of ideas very much. They put people like followers of Falun Gong, and others in "Re-education camps" (coughtorturecampscough). They also banished the Dalai Lama from Tibet, his native homeland for anti-Chinese sentiments. This is the same kind of thing they did post-reconstruction. A little different, but the same basic shtick.