Across five Aprils, from 1861 to 1865, the Civil War was fought between the secession of states of the Southern Confederacy, and the Unionist states of the North. Some 620,000 Americans lost their lives in this conflagration. Battlefields with names like Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and Missionary Ridge, are imprinted indelibly, in our national memory. This war, which abolished slavery, and preserved the Federal Union. Ended in a devastating defeat for the South and the destruction of a culture and way of life, built, in no small part, on the labor of enslaved blacks. In January, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued his celebrated Emancipation Proclamation. An executive order that freed all slaves in Southern territories occupied by Union armies. In 1865 the US Congress approved the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which, upon ratification by the states of the Union, gave the abolition of slavery the nation's most binding legal imprimatur. In 1865 the percentage of enslaved blacks with some degree of literacy was about 10%, despite the ban on black literacy in the years since Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion. After emancipation, African-Americans vigorously pursued education as an expression of their newly won freedom. They moved ahead of the Northern white missionary societies that came south during the post-war reconstruction period to teach newly freed blacks to read and write. The Freedman's Bureau was established in 1866 by the federal government to help guide the former slaves' transition to independence. When Bureau officials set out to start schools for the freedmen in conjunction with northern missionary societies, they were surprised to learn that some 500 schools had already been started by the freedmen themselves. Some of these schools had been in operation since early in the Civil War, for blacks living in territories liberated by Union troops in the coastal Carolinas. Historians have long exaggerated the contributions of single, northern, white missionary women as teachers in the black schools of the reconstruction era. A prominent recent study shows that of more than 11,600 teachers in these schools, between 1861 and 1876, half were southern whites, a third were black, and most were male. Who were the black teachers? Some were free-born blacks from the North. Some with teaching experience. Many were former slaves. Some were graduates of newly founded black normal schools and universities in the South. Others were barely literate. As John W Alvert of the Freedmen's Bureau wrote, quote, some young man, some woman or old preacher, in cellar, or shed, or corner of a Negro meeting house, with the alphabet in hand, or a torn spelling book, is their teacher. Black and white teachers from the North helped, as did the Freedmen's Bureau, which paid salaries and constructed or renovated schoolhouses. Bureau agents served as school inspectors and they encouraged African-Americans in their pursuit of education despite fierce resistance from Southern whites. >> In 1867, the Republican dominated Congress imposed a program of radical reconstruction and military occupation in the South. In tandem, two new amendments to the US Constitution, the 14th and the 15th, established the citizenship rights of Southern blacks and radical reconstruction opened political doors to the newly enfranchised population. Between 1870 and 1876 1,500 blacks held public office, including two as US senators, 15 as US congressmen, and 633 as state legislatures. 11% of these black Republican party officer, hol, office holders had been teachers. >> Mm. Even though the plantation system broke apart after the Civil War, white planters, now in the role of landlords, continued to dominate the South's agricultural economy through a coercive system of land leases, labor contracts, and share cropping arrangements negotiated with poor black laborers and farmers on parcels of former plantation land. When the reconstruction period ended and Northern troops left the South in 1877, white planters, the so-called bourbon class, and the yeoman farmer allies set out to restore white supremacy in the South. They called this redemption. Though the white redeemers did not attempt to abolish public schools for blacks, they tried to steer them in a direction that would ensure blacks mudsill status in the emerging New South. That direction would be industrial education. The Freedman's Bureau was only a way station toward public education for blacks. With no more than 10% of the school-age black children attending school under the bureau's auspices. Legal responsibility for public schooling for both whites and blacks devolved upon the former states of the Confederacy. Under the thumb of radical reconstruction, every Southern state established a public school system. WEB DuBois would declaim quote, public education for all, at public expense, was in the South, a negro idea. >> By the end of reconstruction, most Northern teachers had left the South. After reconstruction, black teachers, not the state governments, bore the burden of organizing the education of Southern black children. Most of these teachers were graduates of black normal schools, such as the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. And private black higher education institutions, such as Atlanta University and Fisk University, which had been founded in the war's immediate aftermath by the Northern American Missionary Association. The South's African-American teachers worked in hard and lonely places. The historian, Adam Faircloth, writes of their situation, quote. In the one room schoolhouses of the rural south, a region of scattered farms and hamlets, teachers faced an uphill struggle. They worked in rickety school houses, lacked furniture and equipment, were paid a pittance, and taught for only three or four months a year. By 1900, only 52% of black children aged 10 to 14 were enrolled in elementary schools, compared with 76% of white children. For children aged five to nine, the figures were much lower. 22% for blacks, 37% for whites. These gaps are likely explained by the great shortage of public schools for blacks. Quite simply, white control state and local governments across the South spent egregiously less on black elementary education then they expended on white schools, which was not a great deal. Blacks were forced to draw on their own sparse resources to construct and maintain schools. [SOUND]
