Quotes About Freedman

A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman, "Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble." That, in short, is the theory on which our public school system is based. By 1880 it had already developed its fundamental characteristics—it was, and is, as Michael Katz writes, "universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased.

The only real avenue for social mobility was that of the freedman, for the manumitted slave could rise higher in Rome than in any other slave society. It takes an effort of imagination to conceive of a society where vast wealth was concentrated in so few hands; perhaps the nearest modern equivalent would be Saudi Arabia.34

It was well understood that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.

XV. FOUNDING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL How the freedman yearned to learn and know, and with the guiding hand of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Northern school-marm, helped establish the Public School in the South and taught his own teachers in the New England college transplanted to the black South.