ABSTRACT
The ex-slaves, Northern educators, and members of the black clergy combined efforts to set up schools during Reconstruction, most of them in black churches. According to almost every account of the postwar South, freed slaves' hunger for learning was insatiable. This hunger led to the creation of the first colleges and universities for African Americans institutions that became vital for educating black leaders and their followers during the age of segregation and beyond. The black colleges as well as day, night, religious, and industrial schools were supervised by the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency commissioned by Congress in 1865. Before the Supreme Court declared segregated education illegal in 1954, black colleges provided African Americans from the South with their hope for post-secondary education. The schools suffered from chronic shortages of funds, but provided the backbone for generations of the African American middle class, educating and training a lion's share of the nation's black doctors, lawyers, businessmen, academics, and other professionals.
