My dad was born in 1914 in SC. He was the son of a sharecropper who worked his kids like slaves, frankly. He never got past the 5th grade because by that time he was too valuable as a work hand than wasting time on schooling all day.
He pretty much had to remain like that - working on the farm- until he couldn’t take it anymore and enlisted in the Army in 1939. He was there in the thick of it from before the war til long after in 1965 when he had to retire because of service connected disabilities that were connected to all the south seas A/H bomb tests he was assigned to.
There was a lot of that until the government made it illegal.
But those laws also is part of the reason that the quality of schooling declined.