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Title: Forty Acres and a School: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Literacy Rates

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2006

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Abstract: The racial gap in educational achievement has been large and mirrored inequality in economic outcomes. While economists such as Robert Margo have done an excellent job in documenting these gaps from 1880 onwards, much of the literature ignores the period immediately following emancipation. The Freedmen's Bureau was a governmental agency set up to assist freed slaves in their transition to their new lives. Perhaps its most important function was in establishing a system of schools in the South. I have obtained data from the US archives on Freedmen Bureau schools. Coupling this information with individual census data, I estimate the effect that these schools had on black literacy and school attendance rates. While previous scholars have minimized the impact of the schools this paper suggests they had a strong effect. Estimates indicate counties with bureau schools had literacy rates nearly 35 percent higher and school attendance rates over 100 percent higher than counties without. These results suggest the Freedmen's Bureau schools had a large impact on the economic and social development of the South.

Url: https://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/colloqpapers/f06/grad/Troost.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Troost, William

Publisher: UCI Graduate Student Seminar

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: United States