Education & Reconstruction in the Washington DC Region

Unsung History

At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education.” In the Reconstruction Era, throughout the South, and especially in the Washington, DC, region, formerly enslaved people fought for educational opportunities. Even as other advances of Reconstruction were clawed back by the forces of white supremacy by the late 19th century, much of the educational progress remained, so that Douglass in 1894 could still see “encouraging signs in the moral skies.” I’m joined in this episode by my son Teddy as co-host and by Dr. Kate Masur, the Board of Visitors Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “I Want to Be Ready,” performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and recorded in New York City on December 22, 1920; the audio is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a photograph from 1864 of the Jacobs Free School, founded by Harriet Jacobs; the photograph was distributed to Northern abolitionists who had helped fund the school and is now in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• “The Blessings of Liberty and Education,” by Frederick Douglass, delivered in Manassas, Virginia, on September 3, 1894, The Frederick Douglass Papers Project.
• “How Literacy Became a Powerful Weapon in the Fight to End Slavery,” by Colette Coleman, History.com, Originally posted on June 17, 2020, and updated on July 11, 2023.
• “An Act to amend the act concerning slaves, free negroes and mulattoes (April 7, 1831),” Encyclopedia of Virginia.
• “Margaret Douglass,” Shaping the Constitution, Resources from the Library of Virginia and the Library of Congress.
• “Harriet Jacobs: Working for Freedpeople in Civil War Alexandria,” by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre, Journal of the Civil War Era, July 16, 2019.
• “Letter from Teachers of the Freedmen,” by Harriet A. Jacobs and Louisa Jacobs, National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 16, 1864, in Documenting the American South.
• “Lost Capitol Hill: The Little Ebenezer Church School,” by Robert Pohl, The Hill is Home, February 9, 2015.
• “The Freedmen's Bureau,” National Archives.
• “History,” Howard University.
• “General Oliver Otis Howard House,” National Park Service.
• “Jennie Dean and the Manassas Industrial School,” Manassas Museum.

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