Black residents were usually the driving force behind bringing a Rosenwald school to a community and fundraising often became a community-wide undertaking. The Rosenwald Foundation provided seed grants for school construction and required communities to supplement the grants with public funds and support from local citizens. Washington believed building schools that could provide traditional and vocational education for Black children would be a key method of “race uplift.” After a successful test group of six Alabama schools, in 1917 Rosenwald established the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, and the School Building Program remained one of the foundation’s primary missions until Rosenwald’s death in 1932. Most Southern states provided little public funding to adequately educate Black children, and many rural communities had no schools for Black children at all. In 1912, Rosenwald was a member of Tuskegee’s Board of Trustees when Washington came to him to suggest donating funds specifically for building Black schools. As a progressive philanthropist, Rosenwald believed one of the country’s most pressing social problems was the “Negro question,” and he supported the ideas and self-help doctrine of Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. The son of German Jewish immigrants, Rosenwald was a clothier who became the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. The schools were named for their primary donor, Chicago businessman Julius Rosenwald. Their history, and the remaining school buildings themselves, are now being reclaimed and preserved. These schools were built specifically to educate Black children, and by 1928 one in three rural Black schoolchildren in the South attended a Rosenwald school. From 1913 to 1932, nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” were built in 15 states, mostly in rural Southern communities. As students start a new school year, this is a chance to honor the legacy of a group of schools that educated hundreds of thousands of Black children.
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