1. Schooling and African Americans in the Post Civil War Era
CHAPTER SIX
Schooling and African Americans in the Post Civil War Era

2. Our past is still with us.
Before We Get Started
Our past is still with us.
I encourage all of you to read the document produced by the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Contextualization.

3. Reconstruction 1865 - 1877 Timeline: 1863: Emancipation Proclamation
1865: Thirteenth Amendment (4 million slaves freed)
1867: “Reconstruction Act”
1868: Fourteenth Amendment ratified (full citizenship)
1870: Fifteenth Amendment ratified (Black males can vote)
1877: Withdrawal of Northern occupation...beginning of so-called period of “redemption.”

4. Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
Reconstruction
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared:
“...that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”

5. Reconstruction
Emancipation Proclamation

6. Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
Reconstruction
Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
Passed in 1865, it declares:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
As a consequence, 4 million slaves were freed (3 ½ million in Southern states)

7. Reconstruction 1865 - 1877 Reconstruction Act (1867)
The South was divided into five military districts...
All males (regardless of race) were allowed to participate in the conventions...
New state constitutions were drafted...
States were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union...

8. Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
Reconstruction
Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
Black men were given the right to vote. But…
Southern states found ways around this:
Poll taxes
Literacy tests
Intimidation and Violence
Not until the Voting Rights Act (1965) were the majority of Southern African Americans free to.

9. Withdrawal of Northern Occupation (1877)
Reconstruction
Withdrawal of Northern Occupation (1877)
Southern states would reassert their racist agenda
Disenfranchisement
Jim Crow Laws
Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) “separate but equal”
Black politicians ousted
"The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery" W.E.B. Du Bois

10. Post-reconstruction Education
Two Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois & Booker T. Washington