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African American Freemen

Decent Essays

The main places freed African Americans had access to education were Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. As seen in the legend, while these states did have the highest populations, the state with the highest percentage, Maryland, was only at 4.87 percent, a strikingly low number. While this number is extremely low, this is still remarkable, that a state can be so slave dependent, yet still have the highest percentage of freemen gaining their right to education. A main reason for this occurrence is Whigs in the North were mainly anti-slavery, and so the free blacks that had escaped and found their way into Pennsylvania or New York had a chance to learn. Education was more easily accessible in the north, due to no need for children …show more content…

Because of this, those four states have the most availability for blacks to invest their time in finding other jobs, or in this case, going to school. In the south, besides in Louisiana, Blacks hardly have the ability to educate themselves. Most blacks, gain their freedom by escaping to the north, because if they left their plantation, they risked being caught, severely punished, and branded a runaway. The freemen who gained their freedom by being emancipated by their previous owners, went to the north with a similar fear, a fear of being mistaken as a runaway just by merely fitting the profile of any runaway slave advertisement, or even by being captured by a slave trader. The few blacks who do stay after their emancipation and received some sort of inheritance from the will of their dead slave owner stayed in the south to buy their loved ones and relatives they left behind or that were taken from them in order to give them their true freedom, or at least the most realistic freedom available to them at this time. The reason the miniscule amount of black in the south did not attempt to strive for a greater education, is due to the fact that they had more on their plates, such as running their own plantations in order to gain enough money to buy back their family’s freedom and their passage to the north. Because of the lack of work available to blacks in the North without plantations, blacks lived in small communities within their separate metropolitan areas, mainly living in ghettos where everybody is fighting to keep a job and/or a roof over their head. Because of the fact that most states prohibited African Americans any public contact with white americans, African American children were not allowed in white public schools in the North. So while these black

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