Through much of the 19th century, Waccamaw Siouan children received no public school education. None existed in the South before the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, Republican-dominated legislatures established public schools, but legislators had to agree to racially segregated facilities to get them passed. Having been free people before the war, the Waccamaw Siouan did not want to enroll their children in school with the children of freedmen. The public schools had only two classifications: white and all other (black and mulatto, the term for mixed-race or "people of color," usually referring to people of African and European ancestry, the most common mixture).