Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870 (African American Studies)

This study of education for freedmen following Emancipation is the definitive treatment of the subject. Employing a wide range of sources, Robert C. Morris examines the organizations that staffed and managed black schools in the South, with particular attention paid to the activities of the Freedman s Bureau. He looks as well at those who came to teach, a diverse group white, black, Northern, Southern and at the curricula and textbooks they used. While giving special emphasis to the Freedmen s Bureau school program, Morris places the freedmen s educational movement fully in its nineteenth-century context, relating it both to the antislavery crusade that preceded it and to the conservative era of race relations that followed.