Existing comment:
Teachers from the North:
More than 11,000 teachers, both African American and white, male and female, taught freed African Americans in the South between 1861 and 1876. This unprecedented educational endeavor created an economic opportunity for teachers willing to move south.
In Washington, DC, the first 16 teachers arrived to teach in the 1861-62 school year. Washington received the highest number of teachers for any city in the South during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a total of 489 by 1876. Washington's long tradition of education for free people of color in the city, the high number of African American refugees, and the fact that every freedmen's benevolent society wanted to have a presence in the nation's capital undoubtedly influenced these positive numbers. John W. Alvord, superintendent of education for the Freedmen's Bureau, declared in awe in January 1866, "What other people on earth have ever shown, while in their ignorance, such a passion for education?" |