Freedmen's Bureau Schools Educate 250,000 Black Students

Freedpeople across the South demonstrated extraordinary hunger for education. Freedmen's Bureau schools, aided by Northern missionary societies and Black communities themselves, enrolled 250,000 students by 1870. Many formerly enslaved adults attended night schools while working. Black communities pooled money to build schoolhouses. The literacy rate among Black Southerners rose from virtually zero in 1860 to approximately 30 percent by 1880 — one of the fastest mass literacy achievements in wor