The need arose from the chronic underfunding of public education for African-American children in the South, as black people had been discriminated against at the turn of the century and excluded from the political system in that region. Children were required to attend segregated schools, and even those did not exist in many places.
Rosenwald was the founder of the Rosenwald Fund. He contributed seed money for many schools and other philanthropic causes. To encourage local commitment to these projects, he conditioned the Fund's support on the local communities' raising of matching funds. To promote collaboration between black and white people, Rosenwald required communities to also commit public funds and/or labor to the schools, as well as to contribute additional cash donations after construction. With the program, millions of dollars were raised by African-American rural communities across the South to fund better education for their children, and white school boards had to agree to operate and maintain the schools. Despite this program, by the mid-1930s, white schools in the South were worth[clarification needed] more than five times per student, what black schools were worth per student (in majority-black Mississippi, this ratio was more than 13 to one).[2]
After the Civil War, Republicans established public schools and funded colleges and universities as part of their Reconstruction era efforts to rebuild the South. The Freedmen's Bureau partnered with church groups to establish school for African Americans.
Disputes over funding ensued. The Rosenwald-Washington collaboration developed to address the needs of rural students, especially the children of formerly enslaved people.
In the segregated schools of the South, African American children were sent to woefully underfunded schools. The collaboration of Rosenwald and Washington led to the construction of almost 5,000 schools for black children in the eleven states of the former Confederacy as well as Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. As a result of their collaboration, approximately one-third of African American children were educated in these schools.[3]
The Rosenwald-Washington model required the buy-in of African American communities as well as the support of white governing bodies. Black communities raised more than $4.7 million to aid in construction, plus often donating land and labor. Research has found that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural Southern black persons during this period. This research also found significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and Northern migration, with gains highest in the most disadvantaged counties.[4]
Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932) was born to a Jewish-German immigrant family. He became a clothier by trade after learning the business from relatives in New York City. His first business went bankrupt, but another he began in Chicago, Illinois, became a leading supplier to the growing business of Richard Warren Sears, Sears, Roebuck, and Company, a mail-order business that served many rural Americans. Anticipating demand by using the variations of sizes in American men and their clothing, determined during the American Civil War, Rosenwald helped plan the growth in what many years later marketers would call "the softer side of Sears": clothing. In 1895, he became one of its investors, eventually serving as the president of Sears from 1908 to 1922. He was its chairman until his death in 1932.
After the 1906 reorganization of the Sears company as a public stock corporation by the financial services firm of Goldman Sachs, one of the senior partners, Paul Sachs, often stayed with the Rosenwald family at their home during his many trips to Chicago. Julius Rosenwald and Sachs often would discuss America's social situation, agreeing that the plight of African Americans was the most serious problem in the United States.[citation needed] The millions in the South had been disenfranchised at the turn of the century and suffered second-class status in a system of Jim Crow segregation. Black public schools and other facilities were chronically underfunded.[citation needed]
Sachs introduced Rosenwald to Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the famed educator who in 1881 started as the first principal of the normal school that he developed as Tuskegee University in Alabama. Washington, who had gained the respect of many American leaders including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, also had obtained financial support from wealthy philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, and Henry Huttleston Rogers. He encouraged Rosenwald, as he had others, to address the poor state of African-American education in the U.S.
In 1912, Rosenwald was asked to serve on the board of directors of Tuskegee, a position he held until his death in 1932. Rosenwald endowed Tuskegee so that Washington could spend less time traveling to seek funding and be able to devote more time toward management of the school. As urged by Washington, Rosenwald provided funds for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914 and overseen by Tuskegee.
Rosenwald Fund
Because many schools were located in areas lacking electricity, the fund designed architectural plans that took advantage of natural light
Julius Rosenwald and his family established the Rosenwald Fund in 1917 for "the well-being of mankind".[5] Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, the Rosenwald Fund was intended to use all of its funds for philanthropic purposes. It donated more than $70 million (equivalent to $887,701,000in 2023) to public schools, colleges, universities, museums, Jewish charities, and black institutions before the funds were depleted in 1948.[citation needed]
The school building program was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund. Using state-of-the-art architectural plans designed by professors at Tuskegee Institute,[6] the fund spent more than $4 million to build 5,388 schools, 217 teacher homes, and 163 shop buildings in 883 counties in 15 states, from Maryland to Texas. The Rosenwald Fund was based on a system of matching grants, requiring white school boards to commit to maintenance and black communities to aid in construction. Fulfilling the goals of the match grant program, African American communities contributed $4.8 million to the building of 5,338 schools throughout the South.[7]
Preservation
After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision (which declared school segregation unconstitutional), the buildings were frequently abandoned or dismantled.[8]
Interior of a Rosenwald School
In some communities, surviving structures have been preserved because of the deep meaning they had for African Americans as symbols of the dedication of their leaders and communities to education. Others were threatened by lack of funds in rural areas, urbanization, changes in demographics, changing styles of education to consolidated and integrated schools, and other social changes.
Former Rosenwald students have led some efforts to preserve Rosenwald Schools. For example, in Georgia, three former Rosenwald Schools were preserved by the efforts of former students and Georgia's Historic Preservation Division, leading to their being listed on the National Register of Historic Places by 2001.[9]
In 2001, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools near the top of the country's most endangered places and created a campaign to raise awareness and money for preservation. At least 60 former Rosenwald Schools are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.[10] In 2015, the National Trust classified the Rosenwald Schools as National Treasures.
Historical marker dedication for Barney Colored Elementary School in Brooks County, Georgia
In Georgia, several Rosenwald School sites have been commemorated through the Georgia Historical Marker Program, currently administered by the Georgia Historical Society. In partnership with community organizations, markers have been erected for the Hiram Rosenwald School (2006, Paulding County), Macon County Training School (2016, Macon County), Barney Colored Elementary School (2013, Brooks County), and Noble Hill Rosenwald School (1995 by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Bartow County).
Researchers measured the effects of Rosenwald Schools on rural southern blacks based on US Census and World War II records, and found that the effect on literacy levels and cognitive scores was large.[14] A 2021 study also found that attending the Rosenwald schools increased the life expectancy of the students, as well as increased their propensity to migrate to the Northern United States.[15]
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
Tuskegee is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, laid out the city and founded it in 1833. It became the county seat in the same year and it was incorporated in 1843. It is the most populous city in Macon County. At the 2020 census the population was 9,395, down from 9,865 in 2010 and 11,846 in 2000.
Tuskegee University is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. It was founded on July 4th in 1881 by Lewis Adams, and Booker T. Washington with help from the Alabama legislature via funding from two politicians seeking black votes.
Julius Rosenwald was an American businessman and philanthropist. He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for establishing the Rosenwald Fund, which donated millions in matching funds to promote vocational or technical education. In 1919 he was appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. He was also the principal founder and backer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, to which he gave more than $5 million and served as president from 1927 to 1932.
Robert Russa Moton was an American educator and author. He served as an administrator at Hampton Institute. In 1915 he was named principal of Tuskegee Institute, after the death of founder Booker T. Washington, a position he held for 20 years until retirement in 1935.
The John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen was a financial endowment established in 1882 by John Fox Slater for education of African Americans in the Southern United States. It ceased independent operation in 1937, by which time it had disbursed about $4,000,000.
The Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind." Rosenwald became part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, serving as its president from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its board of directors until his death in 1932.
Durham's Chapel School, also known as Durham's Chapel Rosenwald School, is a former school for African-American children located in Gallatin, Tennessee, that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
San Domingo School, also known as Sharptown Colored School and Prince Hall Masons Unity Lodge No. 73, is a historic Rosenwald School building located at Sharptown, Wicomico County, Maryland. It was built in 1919, and is a two-story, rectangular frame building with a hipped roof. It is one of four surviving Rosenwald schools in Wicomico County. The school had only four teachers and remained in use as a school until 1957.
Formal education in Mississippi began in the early 19th century with private schools and academies, a public education system was founded during the Reconstruction era, by the biracial legislature led by the Republican Party. Throughout its history, Mississippi has produced notable education inequalities due to racial segregation and underfunding of black schools, as well as rural zoning and lack of commitment to funding education.
The Second Union School is a historic Rosenwald school building for African-American children located near Fife, in western Goochland County, Virginia. It was built in 1918, as a two-teacher school, near Second Union Baptist Church, which had been founded in 1865 as an independent black congregation.
Cadentown School in Lexington, Kentucky was a primary public school for black children in the segregated Fayette County Public Schools from about 1879 to 1922. The building that originally housed Cadentown School, located at 705 Caden Lane, is no longer extant. However, the Rosenwald Fund School is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in Fayette County.
Rosenwald: A Remarkable Story of a Jewish Partnership with African American Communities is a 2015 documentary film written and directed by Aviva Kempner about the career of American businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. It debuted on February 25, 2015 at the Washington Jewish Film Festival.
Claudia Stack was an educator, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Her film productions included “Under the Kudzu” (2012) and “Carrie Mae: An American Life” (2015), both of which focused on schools that African American families helped to build during the segregation era. African American families in the South built schools of many different kinds from Reconstruction through the 1950s. Rosenwald schools form the most recognizable part of this school-building movement. Rosenwald schools were schools that African American communities built in partnership with the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which from 1912 to 1932 helped to build almost 5,000 school buildings across the South.
Fife is an unincorporated community in Goochland County, Virginia. It is about 11.4 miles northwest of the county seat, Goochland, via Rte. 6. It has the oldest surviving Rosenwald school in the county, built in 1918 with assistance from Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Second Union School is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Hiram Colored School in Hiram in Paulding County, Georgia was built in 1930. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. The school is located west of Georgia State Route 92 between its junctions with Fitzgerald Street and Alexander Street.
Washington Graded School is a historic school located in Rappahannock County, Virginia. It was constructed around 1923 as a two-teacher school. The building is a "Rosenwald School." Rosenwald schools refer to those buildings constructed for the education of African-American students, with financial support and plans provided by the Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald, a Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, along with Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute, worked with Black communities across the south to build more than 5,000 schools for Black children. Built in 79 localities in Virginia, about half shared the Washington School two-teacher design. The Washington School, which closed in 1963, retains the early look and feel of its rural setting, and exhibits historic integrity of design, workmanship, and materials.
Okahumpka Rosenwald School is a historic Rosenwald School building in rural Okahumpka, Florida, United States. It was built in 1929 and was used as a school for African American children in the community. It is one of the two remaining Rosenwald Schools in Lake County Florida.
The Union Station School is a historic building and former segregated public school for African-American students from 1928 until 1966, located in Paducah, Kentucky. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since August 19, 2011 for ethnic heritage.
The History of African-American education deals with the public and private schools at all levels used by African Americans in the United States and for the related policies and debates. Black schools, also referred to as "Negro schools" and "colored schools", were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated in the Reconstruction era after the American Civil War. They were created in Southern states under biracial Republican governments as free public schools for the formerly enslaved. All their students were blacks. After 1877, conservative whites took control across the South. They continued the black schools, but at a much lower funding rate than white schools.
References
↑ Deutsch, Stephanie (2015). You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN978-0-8101-3127-9.
↑ McMillen, Neil R. (1990). Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. University of Illinois Press. p.84. ISBN0-252-06156-X.
↑ "Saving Georgia's Rosenwald Schools"(PDF). Reflections. 1 (4). Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources: 3–5. August 2001. Archived from the original on August 9, 2014.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
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