READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL: "To the Secretaries of the American Missionary Association,
Gentlemen: We['ve] organized 2 schools on Saint Catherine's with an attendance of 250 scholars. Brother Mobly gave me a few pamphlets & I bought a few Primers & Slates from him. There are two schools wanted on Ossabaw, three on Sapelo and two on Colonel's Islands."
NARRATOR: When Tunis Campbell landed on the Georgia Sea Islands in the aftermath of the Civil War, he made education one of his first priorities.
Across the South, thousands of African-Americans shared his determination to reverse one of the worst legacies of slavery.
Before the war, most of the Southern states made it illegal to teach a slave to read and write. Now, African-Americans embraced education like nothing else -- lining up in droves, old and young, to go to school.
What was at stake was a sense of a new future.
READING, BLACK MAN: "What would the best soil produce without cultivation? We want to get wisdom. That is all we need. Let us get that, and we are made for time and eternity."
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN: For many black people in the South, to learn how to read and how to figure and how to somehow move in a world of letters, was a revolutionary act, because it now gave them the skills and the tools whereby they could combat the racism that had oppressed them for centuries.
NARRATOR: Hundreds of teachers flocked South, some sent by Northern aid societies or missionary societies, others by the federal government's Freedmen's Bureau.
Many of them were "Yankee schoolmarms," as they would come to be known. But nearly half were black.
Edmonia Highgate, a young black woman from New York State, was one of them
READING, EDMONIA HIGHGATE: "I write to make an application to go South or Southwest as missionary. I have been engaged as teacher for two years and a half among my own people. I am about twenty years of age and strong and healthy. I know just what self-denial, self-discipline, and domestic qualifications are needed for the work and modestly trust that with God's help I could labor advantageously in the field for my newly freed brethren."
NARRATOR: Most of the schools that sprung up were created by black people themselves. They pooled their meager resources to hire a teacher, build a modest schoolhouse or use an abandoned building -- even a slave mart.
Some communities found creative ways to pay their teachers. One of them noted: "The people sent for tuition five eggs and a chicken."
Others chose to tax themselves to fund the new schools.
When harvest time came, children were needed in the field. Some families sent one child to school for a month, then another; some had the educated member teach the rest of the family.
RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN: Children come to school for three hours at a time and leave, and then another class will come in. The adults are being taught at night. They need to read and write as well. They need to understand labor contracts. They need to deal with white people more as equals. And to do that, they have to be literate.
NARRATOR: Soon, the new biracial legislatures started setting up public school systems across the South.
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN: Before the Civil War, the white South had not instituted public education very much at all. Most of the wealthier people sent their children to schools that they paid for. And the South was actually fairly well educated among its more prosperous citizens. But other white Southerners had no public schools to go to. They could only go to whatever year or two school that they could scrounge together.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN: Every Northern state had a public school system. South didn't have that. Only one southern state before the Civil War had a public school system. Large numbers of southern whites were illiterate. Reconstruction establishes the first public school systems in the South.
NARRATOR: Black legislators, like Mississippi's John Roy Lynch, were the first to push for a state-supported school system that would provide access to education for all.
Within a year, Mississippi built 230 schools for black children and 252 for white children.
But in order to finance the schools taxes had to be raised. Although they too were benefiting, many Southern whites were unhappy about the new taxes -- and suspicious about how education might embolden their former slaves.
EDWARD AYERS: [They say] "what are they teaching in those schools?" Well, rumor's going around, they're teaching them, "Vote for the Republican Party." Rumor's going around, they're teaching them not to respect white southerners. Rumor's going around that they're teaching them to be uppity.
NARRATOR: Soon, violence erupted. In Mississippi, schools in many counties were burned or destroyed within months of being erected.
The Ku Klux Klan targeted teachers. In Louisiana, Edmonia Highgate feared for her life.
READING, EDMONIA HIGHGATE: "There has been much opposition to the school. Twice I have been shot at in my room. My night scholars have been shot but none killed... The rebels have threatened to burn down the school and house in which I board. The nearest military protection is 200 miles distant at New Orleans. But I trust fearlessly in God and am safe."
NARRATOR: As Southern governments were taken over by anti-Reconstruction legislators, support for the new schools withered.
But the 1870s saw a new push to focus on higher education, with the birth of black colleges like Howard University, Fisk, Morehouse, and Hampton.
By 1900, there were seventy-five black colleges in the South.
Within 50 years after the Civil War, the rate of illiteracy among Southern black people dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent.
Even though the rise of black schools was stunted by the end of Reconstruction, many of the institutions Southern black people created during this period would become the springboard for later struggles in the 1950s and 60s.
