During Reconstruction in the United States, the Freedmen’s Bureau administered poll taxes and literacy tests during elections.
segregated white and African American students in schools.
built schools and trained teachers for newly freed persons.
helped African Americans relocate from the South to the North.

During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans in the former slave-holding states saw education as an important step towards achieving equality, independence, and prosperity. As a result, they found ways to learn despite the many obstacles that poverty and white people placed in their path. African Americans’ commitment to education had lasting effects on the former slave-holding states. As voters and legislators, they played crucial roles in creating public schools for blacks and whites in the Southern and border states in the late 1800s.

In Sharpsburg, Maryland, a small church known as Tolson’s Chapel was at the center of local blacks’ efforts to educate themselves and their children. African American Methodists built Tolson’s Chapel in 1866, just two years after the end of slavery in Maryland in 1864. For much of the period between 1868 and 1899, this modest building near the site of the Civil War Battle of Antietam served as both a church and a school. The history of the schools housed in Tolson’s Chapel illustrates how African Americans across the former slave-holding states created and sustained schools during Reconstruction.

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