Ann Blue and Harrison Blue were among the tens of thousands of African Americans who put their money and faith in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust. The bank helped many freed African Americans establish a financial foothold, but when it failed in 1874 due in part to fraud, it left many depositors destitute and disillusioned.
Records of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, National Archives and Records Administration
Pass books from the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company for Ann Blue and Harrison Blue, Lexington, Kentucky, 1873
The Freedmen's Bureau
In 1865 Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, to address the needs of displaced and formerly enslaved persons. The bureau administered humanitarian, economic, and legal services; supervised labor contracts; and redistributed abandoned lands. Congress re-chartered the Freedmen’s Bureau over President Andrew Johnson’s veto in 1866, but terminated its activities in 1872. African Americans elected to the House who had worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau included John Mercer Langston, Jeremiah Haralson, Josiah Walls, and Robert C. De Large.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among the Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Freedmen’s Bureau, 1901
Ann Blue and Harrison Blue were among the tens of thousands of African Americans who put their money and faith in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust. The bank helped many freed African Americans establish a financial foothold, but when it failed in 1874 due in part to fraud, it left many depositors destitute and disillusioned.
Records of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, National Archives and Records Administration
