-After the civil war and emancipation, schools for former slaves opened by African American communities throughout the South

-About 500 of the schools operated in the South shortly after the war ended

- In 1865 African American leaders in Georgia formed an education association to raise money and supervise their own schools

- In addition, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide the foundations for education for former slaves. It operated a network of reading, writing, and industrial schools

-By 1869 more than 9,500 teachers taught at Freedmen’s schools and in when the bureau ended in 1870, 4,329 freedmen’s schools had been established with a total enrollment of 247,000 students

-The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Virginia was one of the country’s first institutions of higher education for African Americans

-Booker T. Washington recalls how he walked part of the 500 miles from his home in West Virginia to attend Hampton

-Four years after graduating from Hampton, Washington returned to be the school’s first African American instructor

- Washington believed that education could improve the lives of African Americans just as it had white people

- in 1880 Washington helped to find the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school for African Americans in rural Alabama

- The institute would play a key role in bringing about equality

- The idea of Tuskegee was that correct education begins at the bottom and expands naturally as the necessities of the people expand

- Not all African Americans shared Washington’s philosophy and goals; William E. Burghardt DuBois (the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. and one of the founders of the NAACP) challenged Washington’s views on education.

- DuBois criticized educational programs that seemed to imply that African Americans should accept inferior status and develop manual skills.

-DuBois called for the education of the most talented tenth of the African American population to equip them for leadership positions in society as a whole

-During the late 1800’s, professional teacher organizations began to have a great influence on the development of schools in America

-The National Education Association (NEA), founded in 1857, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, labored to professionalize teaching and to license teachers’ salaries and benefits

-The NEA appointed its Committee of Ten in 1892 and its Committee of Fifteen in 1893 to make recommendations for secondary and elementary curricula, respectively

 - In 1913, the NEA appointed the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education to reexamine the secondary curriculum in regard to students’ individual differences