ENTRY

Rosenwald Schools

SUMMARY

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.

Background

Julius and Augusta Rosenwald

The rural school building program began in 1912 as a collaboration between Booker T. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and Rosenwald, one of the institute’s trustees and the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Washington held that impoverished African Americans could improve economic and social conditions by educating themselves—but at the time, public school facilities for blacks in the rural South were inadequate at best and nonexistent at worst. By providing matching funds to stimulate the construction of safe, sanitary school buildings in rural areas, Washington hoped to improve the state of public education for African Americans and, by extension, African American society as a whole. Rosenwald was a self-made millionaire and progressive whose philanthropic beliefs aligned with Washington’s philosophy of self-reliance. Washington convinced him to allocate part of a larger donation to the Tuskegee Institute toward helping to fund the construction of six schools in rural Alabama. After the success of this initial test, Rosenwald agreed to contribute private funds to build more school buildings.

The Program

Washington and Rosenwald structured the program to engage the communities it benefited: rather than financing the entire construction project, Rosenwald provided partial funds—no more than half the total cost of the project—that had to be matched by the community and by a county school board appropriation. Grants were paid only after matching funds had been secured and construction had been approved. Community members could match the funding in money or in kind, by deeding over land for the project or contributing labor or materials.

Community School Plan No. 1

The types of buildings that could be constructed with the help of a Rosenwald incentive grant included schools, teacher housing, and shop buildings (for vocational instruction). These structures had to meet an established set of modern safety and sanitation standards and were to follow one of several pre-established architectural plans. The plans varied based on the size of the community being served: most of the schools built in the early stages of the program were small one- or two-teacher schools, but plans were later standardized for structures that could support up to eleven teachers. The blueprints incorporated the latest thinking in school design: the wood-frame or brick structures were modest but high-functioning, typically featuring bands of large east- or west-facing windows to provide ample light in regions without access to electricity. The plans were initially developed in 1915 by architecture professors at the Tuskegee Institute; by 1920, the Rosenwald Fund published a series of designs by the program director, Samuel L. Smith, under the title Community School Plans. The book also contained recommendations for nearly every aspect of a school’s physical development, including location, construction materials, blackboard and desk placement, paint colors, and even the types of plants that should beautify school grounds. The principles set forth for Rosenwald schools influenced school architects throughout the United States, in communities that were Black and white, rural and urban.

Virtual Tour of Saint John Rosenwald School

The program, originally based in the extension department of the Tuskegee Institute, grew rapidly in its first five years. By 1917, the demand for grants had outstripped the capacity of the college to manage the far-flung venture—now serving fifteen southern states—so Rosenwald set up his own philanthropic foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, to run the program. (Washington had died two years earlier, in 1915.) In 1920 he moved the operation to Nashville, Tennessee. There, employees of the program identified willing school officials, processed applications, and supervised school construction. Another philanthropic organization, John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, paid for agents at the state level to secure commitments from county school officials and submit to Nashville annual wish lists of the numbers and types of schools desired. By 1928, one of every five schools for blacks in the South was a Rosenwald school.

Edwin Rogers Embree replaced an elderly, ailing Rosenwald as president of the Rosenwald Fund in 1928. At this time the fund was reorganized and shifted its focus to public health initiatives, leadership programs, and higher education. Embree discontinued the Rosenwald rural school building program in 1932, the year of Rosenwald’s death. After 1954, when the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education forbade racial segregation in public education, many counties closed their Rosenwald schools in the 1960s and 1970s as they began to integrate Black and white students. Newer Rosenwald-assisted buildings—by then more than twenty years old—were sometimes incorporated into county desegregation plans or repurposed.

Rosenwald Schools in Virginia

Virtual Tour of Julius Rosenwald High School

The rural school building program began funding projects in Virginia in 1917. Between 1917 and 1932, Rosenwald funds helped build 382 schools and support buildings in seventy-nine Virginia counties. The majority of these buildings conformed to the smaller, one- or two-teacher designs, though schools big enough to accommodate ten and eleven teachers were built in Henrico and Prince Edward counties, respectively. The rural school building program’s involvement in Virginia reached its peak between 1923 and 1924, when forty-five Rosenwald-assisted schools were constructed.

The number of Rosenwald schools that exist in Virginia today is not known. Some have been renovated and restored to community use, such as Rappahannock County‘s Scrabble School, which reopened in May 2009 as a senior center. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed all Rosenwald schools in the United States on its list of most endangered historic buildings.

MAP
TIMELINE
1912
Julius Rosenwald agrees to allocate part of a larger donation to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute toward the construction of six schools for African Americans in rural Alabama.
1914
Julius Rosenwald agrees to fund a larger program for constructing schools for African Americans in rural areas. The program operates out of the extension department of the Tuskegee Institute.
1915
Architecture professors at the Tuskegee Institute develop a series of blueprints for the rural school building program.
1917
Having outstripped the capacity of the Tuskegee Institute to manage the rural school building program, Julius Rosenwald sets up his own philanthropic foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, to run the program. The foundation is based in Chicago, Illinois.
1920
The Julius Rosenwald Fund moves its operations to an office in Nashville, Tennessee.
1920
The Rosenwald Fund publishes a series of architectural plans by Samuel L. Smith under the title Community School Plans. The book also contains recommendations for paint colors, blackboard and desk placement, and school beautification.
1928
Edwin Rogers Embree replaces an ailing Julius Rosenwald as the president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. At this time, the foundation begins to shift its focus from rural school building to public health initiatives, leadership programs for African Americans, and higher education.
1932
After the death of Julius Rosenwald, Edwin Rogers Embree, the president of the Rosenwald Fund, discontinues the rural school building program.
2002
The National Trust for Historic Preservation places all Rosenwald-assisted schools on its list of most endangered historic buildings.
FURTHER READING
  • Ascoli, Peter. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the South. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
  • Hoffschwelle, Mary S. The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
  • McClure, Phyllis. “Rosenwald Schools in the Northern Neck.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 2 (Summer 2005).
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
McClure, Phyllis. Rosenwald Schools. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/rosenwald-schools.
MLA Citation:
McClure, Phyllis. "Rosenwald Schools" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 29 Nov. 2023
Last updated: 2023, July 20
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