When the young Irish immigrant Cornelius McBride arrived in Sparta, Mississippi, a well-to-do planter offered him room and board. In the yard beyond the house, the planter’s former slaves lived in one- and two-room cabins. With a place to sleep and eat, Cornelius could focus on lesson plans and his schoolhouse. He had eighty black students so eager to learn that he added additional night classes right away, so that they could attend school after spending the day working in the fields.
Wendell Phillips was an abolitionist and agitator who fought for the rights of the freed people.
Library of Congress
With its expanded responsibilities, the Freedmen’s Bureau depended on men and women like Cornelius McBride to help them establish public education in the South. It was a daunting task, considering the high illiteracy rate, especially among the former slaves, who had been denied education their entire lives. When the war ended, fewer than 5 percent of the former slaves—just 150,000 out of 4 million—could read and write.
“I went to school two winters a little while. I never went full term any time. I had to work and when the busiest time was over I would go to school when I didn’t work.”
—Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, age eighty-seven in this 1937 photograph. As a baby, she was sold with her mother to a family in Missouri. Her father remained in Kentucky, never knowing where they were. Sarah and her mother never saw him again.
Library of Congress
Many white Americans had mixed feelings about public education for whites as well as blacks. Some didn’t believe education was necessary for everyone, especially the lower classes. This was especially true in the South, where many desperately poor white farmers were illiterate, but it was also true in the North, where public schools were more predominant. Although some whites believed that learning would make the freed people better workers and citizens, others countered that schools weren’t necessary for blacks, whose place, they believed, was in the fields or working for whites in jobs that didn’t require an education.
Southern landowners agreed. They resented the loss of much-needed field labor, especially at cultivation and harvest times. They needed the children in the fields from early spring when the cotton was planted until the last puff was gleaned in the fall. The more black children who attended school, the fewer that worked in the fields.
Some white Southerners didn’t oppose education for the freed people, but they did object to the school’s curriculum, saying it undermined the notion of white supremacy. They complained that Northern teachers and missionaries taught subjects such as geography and history from a Yankee point of view and that they filled their lessons with radical Republican ideas about social and racial equality. White Southerners worried that such lessons taught black students to dislike and mistrust their former masters and other white people.
To these whites, the Yankee schools were continuing the war against the vanquished South. “We should teach the negroes ourselves if we do not want them influenced against us by Yankees,” wrote Myrta Lockhart Avary from Virginia.
Other white Southerners opposed public education because the schools and teacher salaries were funded by property taxes. These men and women considered education as the responsibility of the family or church, not the state. Traditionally, landowners hired tutors for their own children or sent them to private schools, and many saw little reason to change. Poor white farmers and laborers who wanted education for their children should get it themselves and not look to taxpayers to provide it, since the burden fell to property owners.
Northern reformers created didactic textbooks such as this Freedmen’s Second Reader to provide lessons in spelling, reading, pronunciation, and as shown here, a “model” black household.
American Social History Project
“Every little negro in the county is now going to school and the public pays for it,” wrote a disgruntled landowner from Alabama.
Even an essayist for the Atlantic Monthly, a northern magazine, sympathized with the landowners. “The piling up of county and town school taxes was like thrusting hands visibly and forcibly into his pockets,” wrote William Garrott Brown nearly forty years later.
Indeed, the poverty was shockingly real throughout the South. “We have nothing like it in the North,” wrote a Northern teacher from her school in Mobile, Alabama. “The planters have literally nothing left, save the land.” But the teacher added, “The people are not more poor than they are rebellious.”
A former Union general noted the prevailing attitude of landowners toward the cost of educating black Americans: “If the freedmen are to be educated at public expense, let it be done from the treasury of the United States,” wrote Carl Schurz in his report. In other words, the North should contribute to the cost of public education in the South.
This illustration suggests the widespread poverty in the South. Most planters had little or no money to repair the wartime destruction to their land. Here, a white woman sits in despair while in the distance the charred remains of a house or outbuilding can be seen.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 23, 1867; Library of Congress
Some whites warned that education would promote notions of racial equality in black Americans and lead to race mixing. “If we have social equality, we shall have intermarriage, and if we have intermarriage, we shall degenerate; we shall become a race of mulattoes,” warned a white Southern man. “We shall be ruled out from the family of white nations.”
The history of the world fails to show a higher, purer, and more unselfish class of men and women than those who found their way into the Negro schools. . . . Whenever it is written— and I hope it will be—the part that the Yankee teachers played in the education of the Negroes immediately after the war will make one of the most thrilling parts of the history of this country. The time is not far distant when the whole South will appreciate this service in a way that it has not yet been able to do."—Booker T. Washington, 1901. Born around 1856 into slavery, Washington was emancipated at the end of the war. He worked in the salt and coal mines and attended night school. At sixteen, he walked most of five hundred miles to enter the Hampton Institute, Virginia, a boarding school for black students. He graduated in 1881, around the time this photograph was taken, and was hired to found a teacher-training school for blacks at Tuskegee, Alabama. He became recognized as the United States’ foremost black educator.
Library of Congress
In the North as well as the South, many whites willingly provided the freed people with clothing and food in order to prevent suffering and death. Yet, despite their charity, many Northern whites were unwilling to provide blacks with schools and teachers. They worried that educated black Americans would move into better jobs and professions, eventually taking jobs away from white people. And, like Southern whites, many feared race-mixing.
Throughout the South, these attitudes toward the public education of black people made teachers and schools targets for violence. At the very least, Northern teachers found themselves snubbed. Some received politely written notes that made it clear they were unwelcome at church and other social functions. Some found it difficult to find rooms to rent and food to buy. With no other place to stay, the teachers boarded with the families of their black students, and this further angered Southern whites.
In Opelika, Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan murdered a freedman named America Tramblies for boarding a white female teacher. “That was the only place she could get to board,” said Oscar Judkins, a friend of Tramblies’. “He was an honest, kind-hearted man. . . . The men just walked in and shot him in his bed.” No one was ever arrested for the murder.
In 1870, the angry citizens of Patona, Alabama, insisted that a hotel owner evict the “nigger teacher,” a white Canadian named William Luke who had been hired by the local railroad company to teach black workers and their families. With nowhere else to live, the former Methodist minister boarded with a black family, causing hostility and speculation among the white community.
Word soon circulated among the three local Klan dens that William Luke was teaching racial equality to his black students. Klan sympathizers began to monitor Luke’s school and church lessons. They reported that Luke had told black women that they were equal to white women in God’s eyes; that he told his students that black workers should earn the same wages as white workers; and that he had hugged a black woman. This last story grew into a malicious, untrue rumor that Luke had fathered several children with black women.
The rumors incited the Klan, and they demanded that Luke quit teaching. When he didn’t, they tried to force him out of town. Once, a mob of Klansmen confronted Luke outside a church in nearby Jacksonville. Another time, they shot out his bedroom window, unaware that he wasn’t home.
Luke knew of the terrible things that were happening throughout Alabama, that nightriders were terrorizing the countryside, so emboldened that they didn’t even bother wearing masks on their raids. Scarcely a night passed without a beating or a murder. Still, Luke refused to abandon his students and their families. Realizing that the black community couldn’t depend on the law for protection, William Luke bought one gross—one hundred and forty-four—pistols on speculation and sold them to the freedmen.
On Saturday, July 9, seventeen-year-old Patrick Craig, who was white, clubbed a black man named Green Little at the nearby Cross Plains railroad depot. When Little fought back, other whites joined in, thrashing him.
William Luke tried to dissuade the men, but they wouldn’t listen. That night and the next night, Little and several friends armed themselves with the pistols they had bought from Luke. They returned to Cross Plains, looking for Craig and the other whites who had beaten Little.
On Sunday night, they spotted Craig and his friends outside a church, and a short gunfight ensued. No one was injured, but panic spread among the white residents that the black men planned to burn down the town. The white townsmen formed a posse.
The next day, Monday, July 11, the posse arrested four of the black gunmen and William Luke, after someone pointed him out and said, “There is the man that was there last night.” Rumors swept through the town that Luke had told the black men to show the white people of Cross Plains that a black man “could not be whipped with impunity.”
That evening in a schoolhouse jammed with angry whites, the local magistrate led a short public inquiry to determine whether Luke and the four prisoners should be held for trial. During the questioning, Luke acknowledged that he had sold guns to the black men. The black defendants admitted that they bought the guns to protect themselves from the Klan.
The magistrate adjourned the interrogation until the next morning and ordered the five prisoners held overnight. Cross Plains had no jail, and so the men were quartered on a store porch. Five men were deputized to guard the prisoners.
Around midnight, three Klan dens met at a Baptist church, where they voted to take the law into their own hands. On horseback, they headed into town and overtook the guards. Realizing his fate, William Luke allegedly told the Klansmen, “I know I’ve done wrong, but I don’t deserve this.”
At gunpoint, the Klansmen abducted the five prisoners. Just outside Cross Plains, they lynched the four black men from a tall oak tree, saving Luke for last. Before hanging him, they allowed him to write a letter to his wife, who still lived in Canada with their six children. Taking a pencil and piece of paper from his pocket, Luke wrote:
My Dear Wife:
I die tonight. It has been so determined by those who think I deserve it. God knows I feel myself innocent. I have only sought to educate the negro.
I little thought when leaving you so far away that we should then part forever.
God’s will be done! He will be to you a better husband than I have been, and a father to our six little ones.
There is in the company’s hands about two hundred dollars of my money; also my trunk and clothes are here.
You can send for them or let Henry come for them as you think best.
God of mercy bless and keep you, my dear, dear wife and children!
Your William
The next day, someone notified three men from Talladega, Alabama, who had known William Luke: the Reverend Henry Edwards Brown, president of Talladega College; Charles Pelham, a Republican judge; and William Savery, a former slave who had helped to establish the first black school in Talladega.
The men traveled to Cross Plains. They found Luke’s body lying beneath the oak tree, along with the bodies of the four black men. Brown spotted Luke’s letter wedged under a splinter in the top rail of a wooden fence.
They loaded Luke’s body into a pine coffin and accompanied it back to Talladega, where Brown officiated at a well-attended funeral. Luke was buried in the black section of the town cemetery. The families of the four black men were not allowed to claim the bodies. Two days after the murders, the men were buried in paupers’ graves.
William Luke’s tombstone stands in Oak Hill Cemetery, Talladega, Alabama.
Photograph taken by the author
Throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan singled out blacks who had learned to read and write, calling them “uppity.” A Georgia freedwoman who was whipped fifty times for “talking big” and “sassing white ladies” told how the Klan attacked a black schoolteacher’s father. “[They] took every book they had and threw them into the fire, and said they would dare any other nigger to have a book in his house,” said Caroline Smith.
The Klan also torched countless schools, even those built on private property. Some Southern newspapers criticized the violence and arson, but others gleefully reported the episodes, often poking fun.
The freedmen’s school depicted here was burned in the Memphis, Tennessee, riot of May 2, 1866. Similar burnings and other atrocities against teachers occurred throughout the Reconstruction period.
Harper’s Weekly, May 26, 1866; Library of Congress
After fire destroyed two black schoolhouses in two Alabama counties in one night, the Grand Cyclops blamed a comet. “All of its flaming tail dropped off upon three or four negro schoolhouses, set them on fire, and utterly annihilated them,” said Ryland Randolph. “The antics of the tail of this wonderful comet have completely demoralized free-nigger education in these counties; for negroes are so superstitious that they believe it to be a warning for them to stick, hereafter, to ‘de shovel and de hoe’ and let their dirty-backed primers go.”
As whippings occurred nightly in many Southern states, teachers begged for protection. But the widespread Klan violence proved difficult for Republican law enforcement and other officials. By the early 1870s, few federal troops remained in the South, just six thousand soldiers in all, spread among the eleven Klan-infested states, a land area that totaled more than 790,000 square miles.
Even sheriffs with military experience found themselves outmanned and outgunned. “When I gather my posse, I could command the posse, and I could depend upon them,” said an Alabama sheriff, a former captain in the Confederate army. “But as soon as I get home, I meet my wife crying, saying that they [the Klan] have been there shooting into the house. When we scatter to our houses, we do not know at what time we are to be shot down; and living with our lives in our hands in this way, we have become disheartened, and do not know what to do.”
Some of the greatest opposition to public schools occurred in Mississippi. The American Missionary journal reported that one of their teachers received this warning from a Mississippi Ku Klux Klan den:
1st quarter, 8th Bloody moon-Ere the next quarter be gone! Unholy teacher of the blacks, begone, ere it is too late! Punishment awaits you, and such horrors as no man ever underwent and lived. The cusped moon is full of wrath, and as its horns fill the deadly mixture will fall on your unhallowed head. Beware! When the Black Cat sleeps we that are dead and yet live are watching you. Fool! Adulterer and cursed Hypocrite! The far-piercing eye of the grand Cyclops is upon you! Fly the wrath to come,
Ku Klux Klan
For sev
eral months, the young Irish immigrant Cornelius McBride got along well with his white neighbors in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, but he heard terrible stories about the Klan’s nightriding in the surrounding counties. Realizing that the raids were growing more frequent and more violent and closer to his schoolhouse, he recorded the details about each outrage in a notebook.
After a schoolhouse burned not far from where Cornelius boarded, and several more local teachers were attacked, his students warned him that the Ku Klux was after him. “I did not pay any attention to it,” he said. He also ignored the warnings to close his school. After all, his white neighbors had visited his school, praising his work.
In late March, McBride posted a notice advertising a teacher examination to be held at his school. The examination would qualify teachers to apply for a higher grade of certificate, which would increase their meager salaries.
He understood the implications of the examination: Higher teacher salaries would mean higher property taxes for landowners, and that in turn would infuriate the Klan. “They have to pay for educating people that they do not believe in educating,” McBride explained. “They say they are determined not to do it.”
This engraving was made from a photograph. Some say the three men are actual Kukluxers captured in Mississippi for the attempted murder of a family; other historians say the men are federal officers wearing the disguises taken from the captured Klansmen.