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One of the remarkable things about the Bureau is that even though it existed to help those whose labor, ability to own property, get an education, had been denied for centuries, it still had to help poor white people, too, b/c some thought it unfair to help just the enslaved.
I guess we can take some comfort in the consistency of the argument that black people needed to just get over slavery and work hard like everyone else since that admonition began *literally* two days after slavery.
There's a story about how black freedmen got Freedmen's Bureau money to start a school for their children -- for whom it had been illegal to teach to read. Poor white children had no school, so the freedmen let them attend their school...
But some white parents balked at having to send their white babies to a black school -- the only school available -- and so implored the bureau to build them their own school or they'd keep their kids out of school altogether. Can you guess what happened?
The white agents felt bad for the white children and so diverted money from the black school, took one of its teachers, and started an all-white school that black children could not attend -- even tho it was built with the money intended for them. So, yeah.
