Rosenwald schools were educational facilities built with the assistance of the Rosenwald rural school building program, an initiative to narrow racial schooling gaps in the South by constructing better, more-accessible schools for African Americans. They are called Rosenwald schools because they were partially funded by grants from the Rosenwald Fund, a foundation established by Julius Rosenwald, an Illinois businessman and philanthropist. Between 1912 and 1932, the program helped produce 5,357 new educational facilities for African Americans across fifteen southern states, providing almost 700,000 African American children in rural, isolated communities with state-of-the-art facilities at a time when little to no public money was put toward black education. In Virginia, the initiative helped fund 382 schools and support buildings in seventy-nine counties. Most of these buildings remained in operation until Virginia was forced to comply with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed all surviving Rosenwald schools on its list of America’s most endangered historic sites.
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