Freedmen's Bureau Schools Educate 150,000 Black Americans

By 1866 the Freedmen's Bureau oversaw more than 900 schools serving over 90,000 students, rising to 150,000 by 1870. Northern missionary teachers, many of them Black women trained at institutions like Oberlin, staffed schools across the South. Black literacy rates rose from near zero in 1865 to approximately 30 percent by 1880 — a historically unprecedented educational transformation.