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Section 2: Building the Black Community: The Family Section 2: Building the Black Community: The Church Section 2: Building the Black Community: The School Section 2: Quest for Economic Autonomy and Equal Rights Section 2: Memory and Mourning Section 2: Violence

Building the Black Community:
The School

Education, denied them under slavery, was essential to the African-American understanding of freedom. Young and old, the freedpeople flocked to the schools established after the Civil War.

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For both races, Reconstruction laid the foundation for public schooling in the South.

Northern benevolent societies, the Freedmen's Bureau, and, after 1868, state governments, provided most of the funding for black education, but the initiative often lay with blacks themselves, who purchased land, constructed buildings, and raised money to hire teachers.

The desire for learning led families to move to towns and cities so that their children could have access to education, and children to instruct their parents after school hours.
Copyright 2003
A New Birth of Freedom: Reconstruction During the Civil War The Meaning of Freedom: Black and White Responses to Slavery