One of the most significant components of the Freedmen’s Bureau was its education initiative, which built more than a thousand Black schools throughout the nation and allocated $400,000 toward the training of their teachers. By the end of 1865, more than ninety thousand students attended freedmen’s schools, with an attendance rate eclipsing 80 percent of the school-age population.18 For some reason, the white administrators were astounded by the Black pupils’ “natural thirst for knowledge.”
