ROSENWALD'S GIFT

by Joshua Zeitz

American Legacy Magazine, Spring 2003, pp.23-29.

Starting in 1912, a Chicago Jewish Millionaire offered rural blacks a deal: Raise any amount of money to build a school, and he would add more.

Wind your way north from Montgomery, Alabama, on U.S. Highway 31, and you'll eventually stumble across Pine Level, a sleepy town about 20 miles from the state capital. There, if you look hard enough, you'll find the Mount Sinai Junior High School, a ramshackle building where thousands of black children received their formative academic instruction between 1919 and 1967, after which the facility was finally retired from service. Though its wooden exterior is rotting away and the back of the building is sagging toward the ground, the school remains eerily intact. Of the several potbelly stoves that once heated its four classrooms, all but one are still in place, as are dozens of wooden desks and an ancient piano. The shelves that line its 12-foot-high walls are still full of books, including an English literature text from 1926, mossy with dust.

The school is a testament to the resilience of Alabama's black community under Jim Crow. It also beckons us to remember the power of interfaith, inter-racial cooperation. Mount Sinai Junior High is one of the very few so-called "Rosenwald schools" still standing in Alabama. Financed by a cooperative endeavor that brought together rural blacks and a Chicago department store magnate, these schools helped cement an important alliance between Northern white liberals and black communities throughout the South.

Julius Rosenwald was a self-made, early partner of Sears, Roebuck and Company, who built it into America's biggest mail-order business and became one of the nation's wealthiest men. Between 1912 and 1932 he helped to bankroll the construction of approximately 5,300 rural schools in 14 Southern states. For a time these humble but highly effective institutions educated more than 25 percent of all African-American schoolchildren in the South. In keeping with prevailing notions about philanthropy, Rosenwald never raised a single school entirely with his own funds. Instead, he offered matching grants, typically amounting to between 20 and 25 percent of total building costs, to communities and local governments after they had collected the necessary money to begin construction.

Although Rosenwald ultimately spent $4.2 million building new black primary and secondary schools, his grandson, Peter Ascoli, reminds us that "it's important to note that black people gave more [$4,7 million] to build these schools than he did."

The son of Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862. His boyhood home stood directly across the street from the home of Springfield's most celebrated family, the Lincolns. Though he was born too late to meet the President---Abraham Lincoln left Springfield in early 1861, never to return---he might very well have remembered watching Lincoln's funeral cortege move through the city's streets in May 1865. Or he might have stolen an occasional glimpse of his neighbor, the grief-stricken Mary Todd Lincoln, when she lived out her last days in Springfield in mournful seclusion.

Growing up when and where he did, Rosenwald almost certainly acquired an early sense of racial justice. Yet throughout his long philanthropic career, he would consistently attribute his deep social consciousness at least in part to his family's Jewish heritage. "Whether it is because I belong to a people who have known centuries of persecution," he once remarked, "or because I naturally am inclined to sympathize with the oppressed, I have always felt keenly for the colored race."

Rosenwald would later contend that his empathy toward African-Americans remained mostly dormant until he read An American Citizen: The Life of William Henry Baldwin, Jr., by John Graham Brooks, and Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington's autobiography. Washington first came to national attention in 1895, when he delivered his "Atlanta Compromise" address to an audience of prominent white Southerners. In it, he proposed that former black slaves embrace manual and industrial labor in a deliberate effort to gradually elevate their entire race. In return, Washington expected, white Southerners would provide blacks at least a modicum of opportunity for advancement.

Impressed by Washington's program for black self-uplift, Rosenwald joined forces with him to initiate the rural-school construction project. In 1913 and again in 1915, just nine months before Washington's death, Rosenwald led delegations of Chicago philanthropists to visit the Tuskegee Institute, meet there with Washington, and see schoolhouses that had been erected. Finally, in October 1917, Rosenwald officially incorporated the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

The Rosenwald project was invaluable for black communities, because white Southerners had never honored their end of the Atlanta compromise. Even as they nodded approval of Washington's proposal, Southern policymakers contrived to keep former slaves and their descendants in a state of permanent dependency. As late as 1940 the state of Alabama devoted 3.2 times as much money per pupil to white students as to black ones; in Mississippi, spending per pupil on white children was 7.2 times spending on blacks. Surveys of white Southerners at the turn of the nineteenth century confirmed the popular desire to keep the black population mired in illiteracy and ignorance. In North Carolina 90 percent of whites opposed compulsory education for black children, believing that educated blacks would have no interest in working as farm laborers. Mississippi's segregationist governor James K. Vardaman, known as the "Great White Chief," argued without embarrassment in 1909, "Money spent today for the maintenance of public schools for negroes is robbery of the white man, and a waste upon the negro."

In light of the gaping educational divide that separated black and white Southerners, it's remarkable that ordinary African-Americans reduced their illiteracy rate from a whopping 90 percent at the end of the Civil War to half that on the eve of World War II, some 75 years later. They did so through an unfailing dedication to school spending, despite their meager economic resources. They also benefitted from the support of independent philanthropic organizations, not just the Rosenwald Fund, but also the Peabody Education Fund, the John Slater Fund, the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, and the Phelps Stokes Fund, all of which steered vital resources to the cause of black education.

Yet as Rosenwald's grandson recently affirmed, it was the black community that most deserved credit for creating vibrant institutions of learning. Simply raising beams and walls is one matter; educating children and forging community pride are something still greater. "Julius Rosenwald said that they were going to have to bring some Negro folks in if he were going to donate matching funds. And there were many black people out there in the trenches, most of them unknown, who traveled tirelessly to bring this possibility [of a school] to their communities," says Nyoni Collins, a director of the North Carolina Rosenwald Schools Community Project. "These people need to be recognized." One such person is the late George Edward Davis. The retired dean of the all-black Biddie Memorial Institute (now Johnson C. Smith University), in Charlotte, Davis left what Collins calls his "black ivory tower" to go out into impoverished countrysides and "basically talk to farmer so-and-so, whose donation might constitute a chicken. He went to so many places in North Carolina that they called him 'the Rosenwald man'."

Many students who attended Rosenwald schools in the years prior to the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling of 1954 recall that the modest wood-frame buildings were, as Connie Quarles recently called her alma mater, the Sweet Home Vocational and Agricultural High School in Texas, "the hub of our community." She adds, "It's where everyone went, where everything evolved. That was the center of our life." She had to walk a daunting two-and-a-half miles to school each morning, and the same distance back home each afternoon, and she credits Sweet Home with making her "a leader, a strong black woman."

Rosenwald's form of generosity has had its critics over the years. Some black leaders of the time, including W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, felt Washington was an Uncle Tom who kowtowed to rich white Northern philanthropists. Amilcar Shabazz, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, contends that the emphasis on vocational rather than strictly academic training betrayed a desire on the part of Rosenwald and his associates to keep blacks "a racially subordinate working class." In 1999 Shabazz told a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "all philanthropy is not ideologically free. You can't ignore the question of why they give."

Yet Rosenwald's philanthropic vision may have reflected a realistic awareness of the almost total lack of white-collar jobs in the Southern countryside. At the same time the Rosenwald Fund was pressing its campaign to extend educational opportunities to African-Americans in the former Confederacy, public and private philanthropies in the North were experimenting with similar projects to help new European immigrants adjust to American life. Jn sum, the Rosenwald schools can hardly be dismissed as a deliberate attempt to stifle black progress.

In their intent---and, if their alumni are to be believed, in their results---these institutions helped fill an important void. "From this school we've had educators all the way up to the university," remarks Thaddeus McDonald, a graduate of a Rosenwald school in Cedar Creek, Texas. The grandson of an illiterate ex-slave, McDonald boasts that his alma mater churned out "lawyers, TV personalities, bankers, a lot of ministers, and a whole lot of elementary and middle school teachers. The school has been an invaluable asset to our people."

Explaining that he didn't believe in "storing up large amounts of money for great periods of time," Rosenwald stipulated that the fund use up all its wealth within 25 years after his death. It took the trustees only 16 years; by 1932 the money was gone.

Southern communities began phasing out the Rosenwald schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Anticipating the NAACP'S challenge to Jim Crow education, some state legislatures pumped new money into black public schools in the decade following World War II. They did so in a cynical attempt to discredit the argument that segregated schools were inherently unequal. In this rush to modestly upgrade black classrooms, many of the original Rosenwald buildings were abandoned. The trend accelerated in the late 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson used both the carrot (federal school funding) and the stick (potential legal action) to force an end to school segregation in the South. Largely because of his success in this area, the remaining Rosenwald schools soon closed.

Today, very few still even stand. Of Alabama's 389 Rosenwald schools, only about 20 survive; just four of 25 built around Charlotte, North Carolina, remain intact. Some have been converted into community centers and church annexes. Others, including one in Parole, Maryland, now house residential apartments. More commonly, the failing structures have been demolished, their insides gutted, their exteriors salvaged for scrap wood. This fate recently befell a Rosenwald school in Reserve, Louisiana. "It's hard to see an old landmark go," a town resident lamented.

Last summer the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the surviving Rosenwald schools on its list of 11 most endangered historic sites. Roger Moe, the president of the Trust, hopes that his organization's efforts will help galvanize community support for the aging buildings. "Many [landmarks on the list] have been saved because people realize their heritage is too important to be hauled off to the landfill," Moe says. He believes that will happen with the Rosenwald schools.

Indeed, local communities are working hard to preserve the legacy. In Pine Level, Alabama, organizers have gathered $20,000 to repair the Mount Sinai Junior High School's roof and windows, and they recently won an additional $18,600 in state funding to conduct more extensive restoration work.

Nyoni Collins feels there is still much to do. "Unless there are advocates for these sites, they won't get on the National Register, which would help them buy time," she says. "People need to approach their state historic-preservation offices. They'll find them very supportive." And Collins adds a further reason to consult the professionals: Eligibility for historical status may be lost through repairs or improvements. "Without knowing it," she says, "you can compromise the historical integrity of a structure and ruin the chance for gaining National Register status for your building or site. It has happened."

And in the end, she says, this is not merely a matter of sentimentality. "The importance of preserving these buildings cannot be stressed enough. I have actually heard people call them tangible evidence that puts the lie to the idea that blacks were not worthy of an education, and not motivated enough to get one."

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Joshua Zeitz's interview with the photographer Bruce Davidson ("Unknown But Not Unseen") appeared in the Winter 2003 issue. For information on how you can help save a Rosenwald school or other historic building or site in your state, call the National Trust for Historic Preservation at 202-588-6000 or visit www. nationaltrust.org/help/statewide.org.asp