![]() ![]() They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness. Access to education for themselves and their children was, for blacks, central to the meaning of freedom, and white contemporaries were astonished by their “avidity for learning.” A Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported in 1865 that when lie informed a gathering of 3,000 freedmen that they “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds. Before the war, every Southern state except Tennessee had prohibited the instruction of slaves, and while many free blacks had attended school and a number of slaves became literate through their own efforts or the aid of sympathetic masters, over 90 percent of the South’s adult black population was illiterate in 1860. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education. ![]() ![]() Back to Unit 7 From Chapter 5, “The Meaning of Freedom” ![]()
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