" In fact, African Americans did not wait for Johnson’s blessing, let alone for government support or a white benefactor. One Freedmen’s Bureau official recorded, “Throughout the entire South … an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves.” He identified “at least 500 schools” built, staffed, and run by black people. In Georgia, for example, by the fall of 1866, African Americans “financed entirely or in part 96 of the 123 day and evening schools.” Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked, “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life. "

― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide