Where separate schools were provided, the teachers were often carpetbaggers who strove "to make treason odious." It is hardly surprising that some parents objected to having their children forced to sing _John Brown's Body_ and to yield assent to the proposition that all Southerners were barbarians and traitors who deserved hanging.
Just after the close of the Civil War, thousands of white women went South to teach in schools which were established for negroes by Northern churches or benevolent associations.

Every one who reads the reports of such organizations now, fifty years after, must be touched by the lofty faith and the burning zeal which impelled many of these educational missionaries; but he must also be astonished by their ignorance of the negro and their blindness to actual conditions.

They went with an ideal negro in their minds, and at first, they treated the negro as though he were their ideal of what a negro ought to be.

The phases through which the majority of these teachers went were enthusiasm, doubt, disillusionment, and despair.

Some left the South and their charges, holding that conditions were to blame rather than their methods; but others were clearsighted enough to realize that they had set about solving the problem in the wrong way.
Beginning with the assumption that the negro was equal or superior to the white in natural endowment and burning with resentment against his "oppressors," they attempted to bridge the gap of centuries in a generation.