11/18/2022
During Reconstruction, Black communities founded the first public school systems — with over 1,000 new schools — in the South, aided in part by the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern benevolent societies. Reconstruction constitutions appropriated tax funds to create many of these schools, which educated hundreds of thousands of Black and white students.
Underlining the connection between freedom and education, between 1864 and 1876 alone, white supremacists burned over 630 Black schoolhouses. A recent survey of federal archives and historical newspapers shared this finding in The Journal of the Civil War, estimating that the actual number of Black schoolhouses destroyed in this period far exceeds the documented number. Learn more below in a new Education Week piece, check out our new national report, and .
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/racist-bomb-threats-and-post-civil-war-school-burnings-a-scholar-connects-the-dots/2022/03
