Pictorial Portrayal of Black Education in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1866

Abstract

In the southern states of the United States, black education-the education for black people-started during the Civil War and boomed in the Reconstruction. Before the war, the mass of blacks in the South could have no schooling at all. For about three decades before the war, as a white response to Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831 in Virginia[!]' all southern states forbade by law education for slaves and even free blacks. Prior to 1864, whatever education blacks received was mostly by hiding out and learning on the sly. With the Emancipation, the previously-tightly-shut door to education was opened to black people. Black and white educators went into the South from New England and the Mid-west; various schools for blacks emerged in towns and villages throughout the South. In 1866, the year immediately after the war, 1,405 teachers taught freed people in 975 schools; by the end of the decade, over 2,560 teachers oversaw 2,039 schools. No fewer than 51 groups-20 secular, 31 sectarian-were at work in black education from 1862 to 1875.[ 21 A major component of the job of the Freedmen's Bureau was helping 119