WHY IS THIS RELEVANT NOW?
The first family, The Obamas have made decisions about where Malia and Sasha will go to school. I really wasn’t surprised by the choice school, Sidwell Friends. America will remember the name as the school where Chelsea Clinton attended and was yearbook editor. The choice is also a very sharp contrasts of where African Americans would send their children after they were no longer enslaved. As a newly freed people, we were obsessed with education. Grown men walked around with spellers for the chance of any moment of spare time. Later the Rosenwald Schools would emerge. My own mother attend one in Kilgore, Texas. So, one more generation sends their children to school with high hopes. We’ve known for many children that a good education is the way up and out. OTHER RELATED POST that I will create today is Freedmen’s Bureau.
SCOPE NOTE
Upon the emancipation of enslaved Africans and their descendents, Washington, D. C. became the likely destination of the newly-freed people. Washington created a coping mechanicism, the Freedmen’s Bureau to act as an emergency facility. From that effort, the Freedmen schools were established all over the South the educate form slaves and their children. The populoar belief in the Bureau was through education, the emancipated would becomeempowered to mold their own lives and re-invent themselves. The written account of these schools depict small, one-room schools that served as churches on Sundays and a classroom otherwise. Much of what can be learned of these colorful schools is offered through the diaries and narrarives of the staff who ran them.
PUBLISHED MATERIAL(S)
The Fire of Liberty in their Hearts: the Diary of Jacob E. Yoder of the Freedmen’s Bureau School, Lynchburg, Virgian, 1866-1870 by Jacob E. Yoder
The Freedmen’s Bureau Schools of Natchitoches Parish, Lousisiana, 1865-1868 by Susan E. Dollar
Sarah Jane Foster, Teacher of the Freedmen: A Diary and Letter by Wayne E. Reilly (Editor)
Autobiography of James L. Smith; including also, reminiscences of slave life, recollections of the war, education of freedmen, causes of the exodus, etc. by James Lindsay Smith
Reading, Writing and Reconstruction by Robert Charles Morris
His Truth is Marching On: African-Americans Who Taught the Freedmen for the American Missionary Association 1861-1877 (Studies in African American History by Clara Merritt Deboer)
Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 by JacquelineJones
REFERENCE MATERIAL(S)
Encyclopedia of African American Heritage, 2nd edition
PRIMARY SOURCES
Semi-annual report on schools for freedmen: number 1-10, January 1866-July 1870
The Freedman’s Spelling Book:
The Freedmen’s second reader;
The Freedman’s third reader
POSSIBLE KEYWORD SEARCHES
slaves + education
reconstruction + education
antebellum + education
slaves + quaker schools
KEY FIGURES
Charlotte Forten Grimke
RELEVANT WEBSITES
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-634
RELATED POSTS
Freedmen’s Bureau
