![]() (One 1867 Louisiana contract specified that the planter pay a “5 per cent tax” to support black education.) Adults as well as children thronged the schools established during and after the Civil War. “The desire of learning led parents to migrate to towns and cities in search of education for their children, and plantation workers to make the establishment of a school-house “an absolute condition” of signing labor contracts. They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness. Access to education for themselves and their children was, for blacks, central to the meaning of freedom, and white contemporaries were astonished by their “avidity for learning.” A Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported in 1865 that when lie informed a gathering of 3,000 freedmen that they “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds. ![]() ![]() Before the war, every Southern state except Tennessee had prohibited the instruction of slaves, and while many free blacks had attended school and a number of slaves became literate through their own efforts or the aid of sympathetic masters, over 90 percent of the South’s adult black population was illiterate in 1860. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education. ![]() ![]() Back to Unit 7 From Chapter 5, “The Meaning of Freedom” ![]()
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