How did Freedmens Bureau agents work to create schools?
Ted Tunnell: [Marshall Twitchell] was very proud of the role he played in creating black schools. The [Louisiana state] constitution required one school per parish. Twitchell is actually going to create ten schools in Red River Parish. Now, he doesn’t try to create desegregated schools. Nobody, indeed hardly anybody in the South, is able to do this. New Orleans has a few desegregated schools for a brief time during Reconstruction, but nobody makes it work in the rural parishes. So Twitchell though, he does create black schools. He creates five schools for whites and five schools for blacks. He’s very proud of this. When he first institutes this program, there are rumors that the black schools are going to be busted up, that white gangs are going to burn them down. He puts out the word that if the black schools are busted up, he will stop paying the teachers in the white schools. It works. They let the black schools alone.
