The Freedmen’s Schools teachers were predominantly young single women from the North who were selected for their “moral” and religious backgrounds. Historian Jacqueline Jones offers an interesting reflection on the ways these women were characterized: “I tend to see the teachers in a more complex way: they were neither saintly souls, nor were they meddlesome busybodies. But, in fact, they were ordinary young women who felt strongly that they wanted to have a role in the great drama that was the Civil War. They wanted to contribute what they could to black men and women. They did not always understand the culture that they had entered in the South, but at the same time, they were really exceptional for their day.” I was intrigued by the ideal of these female teachers as “saintly souls” and how this trope relates to the “separate spheres”/”cult of true womanhood” of the time period and ideals about middle-class women that female reformers were expected to to conform with.

The teachers, for the most part, modeled the curriculum on that of the northern antebellum common schools with a lot of rote learning and recitation emphasized and a focus on learning to read and write (basic literacy). This was a radical idea – since during slavery, it was illegal to teach a slave how to read and write. Significantly, they also attempted to help their students “unlearn” the identity of a slave: I’d like to learn more about this goal. Along with traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic, they also taught "lessons of industry, of domestic management and thrift, lessons of truth and honesty," ideals reflective of northern white middle-class society. A large percentage of their students were adults, about 1/3 of the students in Georgia’s Freedmen’s Schools. The curriculum and its melding of literacy with other skills and challenges to white supremacist beliefs foreshadows the Freedom Schools established during the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, and I am interested in learning more about the curricula in these various schools (which I’m sure varied) and also whether the Freedom Summer volunteers were inspired by the Freedmen’s Schools 100 years earlier. In both the Freedmen’s Schools and Freedom Summer schools, the teachers were predominantly young white northerners who traveled down to the South to try to help the African Americans claim their rights and equality through education as well as in other aspects of their lives.

There are many other ways that the Freedmen’s Schools of Reconstruction were similar to those of the Freedom Summer Project: makeshift school facilities (in an old church or shack or even outdoors) and the backlash they faced by southern white supremacists, just to name two.

The Freedmen’s School teachers also helped to distribute needed supplies, such as food, clothing, and blankets, helped freedpeople find shelter, and provided medical aid. Caroline Croome, a teacher in North Carolina, commented on the sheer number of duties she had beyond the work of a classroom teacher: “Teaching school is only part of my business (of course, the chief part); but I am called upon to act as physician, nurse, notary public, church-warden, justice of the peace (don't laugh, please, at my high-sounding letters, for they are very serious things), undertaker, and corresponding secretary, for all the colored between Newbern and Beaufort.”

Significantly, some of the Freedmen’s School teachers were African Americans: 25% of the Freedmen’s Schools teachers in Georgia. Charlotte Forten Grimké is considered to be the first northern African American teacher in the Freedmen’s Schools; she taught at the Penn School on St. Helena Island, one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands (though only for two years, due to illness – which was another challenge faced by many of these teachers due to the unhealthy environment and epidemics in the South at this time). She was born to a free and fairly privileged Philadelphia family; her parents were activists in the abolitionist movement as was her grandfather and were part of the same social circles as William Lloyd Garrison (the prominent white abolitionist) and the black minister Richard Allen. Charlotte received a strong education first with a tutor (instead of the segregated black public schools in Philadelphia), then in Salem, Massachusetts, where she lived with a black abolitionist family in order to attend an integrated private girls’ school. She continued her education at the Normal School in Salem (a teacher training school) and then became the first African American hired in Salem’s public schools. She also became a key abolitionist leader in the 1850s, publishing poems in The Liberator and other anti-slavery publications and encouraging black women to join the abolitionist movement. From 1862-1864, she taught at the Penn School and wrote extensively about her experiences as a Freedmen’s School teacher; her diaries are an illuminating and important primary source. One diary entry conveys her attempt to instill pride in her students through teaching them about influential African Americans: "Talked to the children a little while to-day about the noble Toussaint [L’Ouverture]...It is well that they should know what one of their own color could do for his race." I found it interesting that though she had hoped to connect with the African American community, she instead discovered that she had more in common with the white abolitionists on St. Helena.  If her married name sounds familiar – that’s because she later married the nephew of the famous Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, prominent abolitionists and women’s rights activists. After she returned to the North, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C., she continued her activism, notably as a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

It's important to note that even though the Freedmen’s Schools provided educational opportunities for African Americans, the Freedmen’s Bureau was severely underfunded; in Georgia during the heyday of the Freedmen’s Schools (Reconstruction), only 10% of the state’s African American population gained access to an education. And, due to the Freedmen’s Bureau’s limited funds, the free black communities themselves had to take on the majority of the funding of the Freedmen’s Schools.

My research indicates that after Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Schools ended as southern white supremacists sought to limit opportunities for African Americans and segregation took hold: a segregated public school system emerged with very little funding available for African American schools. In Georgia, “from 1870 until well into the twentieth century, white Georgians sought to limit public funding for Black education. Local districts refused to support public secondary education for African American students. Teachers in Black schools received lower salaries than those in white schools, regardless of the teachers’ race, and construction and maintenance of Black schools were neglected. The state would not provide public higher education to its former bondsmen until it founded Georgia State Industrial College (later Savannah State University) in 1891.” [Butchart, Ronald. "Freedmen’s Education during Reconstruction." New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Sep 16, 2020. removed link In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those African Americans who did manage to access a formal education were mostly limited to Booker T. Washington’s concept of industrial education which emphasized vocational skills and manual labor instead of academic training for African Americans.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, despite its short duration and underfunding, ultimately had a positive legacy on African American education, helping to fund the establishment of several historically black colleges, including Atlanta University (1865; now Clark Atlanta University) and Fisk University (1866; originally the Fisk School), named for Gen. Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who gave the school its original facilities in a former Union army barracks.