George Fitzhugh

Southern slaves had few, if any, educational opportunities. However, thousands of schools for freed slaves and their children were built during Reconstruction. In the following viewpoint George Fitzhugh, a writer and former agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau—a government department established in March 1865 to assist refugees and newly freed slaves—argues that educating blacks is both unnecessary and harmful. He asserts that a literary education makes blacks discontented, miserable, and unfit for bodily labor, which Fitzhugh contends is the only employment to which they are suited. According to Fitzhugh, education is a luxury that freed slaves cannot afford and that southern whites should not support.

Educate negroes? Surely: educate them from early childhood for all those industrial pursuits for which they are adapted. But don’t attempt to make carpenters, or manufacturers...