The "Advertiser" of Montgomery stated that education was a danger in slavery times but that under freedom ignorance became a danger.

For a time there were numerous schools taught by crippled Confederates and by Southern women.
But the education of the Negro, like his religious training, was taken from the control of the Southern white and was placed under the direction of the Northern teachers and missionaries who swarmed into the country under the fostering care of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Northern churches, and the various Freedmen's Aid Societies.

In three years the Bureau spent six million dollars on Negro schools and everywhere it exercised supervision over them.

The teachers pursued a policy akin to that of the religious leaders.

One Southerner likened them to the "plagues of Egypt," another described them as "saints, fools, incendiaries, fakirs, and plain business men and women." A Southern woman remarked that "their spirit was often high and noble so far as the black man's elevation was concerned, but toward the white it was bitter, judicial, and unrelenting." The Northern teachers were charged with ignorance of social conditions, with fraternizing with the blacks, and with teaching them that the Southerners were traitors, "murderers of Lincoln," who had been cruel taskmasters and who now wanted to restore servitude.
The reaction against Negro education, which began to show itself before reconstruction was inaugurated, found expression in the view of most whites that "schooling ruins a Negro." A more intelligent opinion was that of J.L.