Finding hope in early efforts to educate the formerly enslaved
by Ken Makin
Apr 11, 2023
3 minutes
Black people in America have long correlated learning with liberation, largely because of the difficulty endured acquiring an education and the opportunity it promised. Even today, the very act of teaching Black children is radical, not just because it often exposes racism, but because it presumes that education is a civil right.
When Black people in the South sought schooling during Reconstruction, right after the Civil War, they found refuge in Freedmen’s Schools, established by the Bureau of Refugees, to provide resources, including education, to the formerly enslaved. In July of 1866, another bill extended the bureau’s life for two years.
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