The Freedman’s Savings Bank established its headquarters in Washington, D.C., at Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place, today the site of the Treasury Department Annex.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Freedman's Savings Bank, ca. 1890, James M. Goode Collection
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
The Freedman’s Savings Bank established its headquarters in Washington, D.C., at Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place, today the site of the Treasury Department Annex.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
