A hundred years ago, Black families across the rural South gave their land, their savings and their own labour to build schoolhouses for their children. A Jewish businessman from Chicago helped them build nearly 5,000.
Two men and one idea
Julius Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany. He built his fortune at Sears, Roebuck and Company, becoming its president in 1908. Booker T. Washington was the founding leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, now Tuskegee University.
The two men were introduced in the early 1910s, and in 1912 Rosenwald joined Tuskegee's board of trustees, a seat he kept until his death. That year he gave Washington $25,000 for Tuskegee-related work. Washington set aside part of it for an experiment: helping rural Black communities near Tuskegee build their own elementary schools.
A school built by the whole community
The first six schools opened in rural Alabama in 1913 and 1914. The model that made them work was a challenge grant. Rosenwald would contribute part of the cost, but only if the local community raised money to match it, and only if the public school authorities agreed to run and maintain the building as part of the public system.
Black families answered that challenge again and again. They raised cash, donated land and often did the building work themselves. In many places Rosenwald's share covered only a modest part of the cost. North Carolina's first Rosenwald school, the Warren Grove School, was finished in 1915 for $1,622: the local Black community raised $486, the school system and white residents gave $836, and the Rosenwald program gave $300. Across the whole program, Black communities raised about $4.7 million, more than Rosenwald's own contribution of roughly $4.3 million.
Professors at Tuskegee drew up the building plans. They designed simple schoolhouses with many windows for light and fresh air.
From six schools to thousands
Washington died in 1915, but the work continued, with Margaret Murray Washington among those who carried it forward. In 1917 Rosenwald set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund to manage the school program and his wider giving, and the building spread across the South.
By the time the program ended in 1932, the year Rosenwald died, it had helped build 4,977 schools, 217 teachers' homes and 163 shop buildings in 883 counties across 15 states, serving more than 663,000 students, according to the Library of Congress. By 1928, one third of the rural Black schoolchildren and teachers in the South were in Rosenwald schools.
Rosenwald also believed that a foundation should spend its money in its own time rather than exist forever. His generosity reached well beyond the schools. He offered challenge grants of more than $600,000 toward YMCAs for Black communities in two dozen cities, was the principal founder of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and through the Fund gave fellowships to promising Black scholars and artists, among them Pauli Murray of Durham, North Carolina. The Fund also helped pay for early NAACP legal work that contributed to the challenge against school segregation. True to his belief in giving while living, the Fund gave away about $70 million to schools, colleges, museums and other causes, and closed in 1948 once its money was spent.
“It was beautiful, and it was our school.”John Lewis, U.S. congressman and Rosenwald school alumnus, Quoted in The Times of Israel, 2021
The children who walked through those doors
The schools educated a generation that would go on to change America. The poet Maya Angelou attended a Rosenwald school in Arkansas. The future congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis attended one in Alabama, and the singer Nina Simone one in North Carolina. The civil rights leader Medgar Evers and Carlotta Walls LaNier, one of the Little Rock Nine, were also Rosenwald alumni.
After the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in 1954, most Rosenwald schools closed as districts consolidated. Some were reused as community centres or museums, and many more were left to decay. Today only about one in ten is thought to survive.
Saving the schoolhouses
In 2002 the National Trust for Historic Preservation put Rosenwald schools on its list of America's most endangered historic places, and it later named them a National Treasure. Its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has given more than $2.5 million in matching grants to help restore them, and community groups and nonprofits across the South are working to restore the buildings that remain. The Atlanta photographer Andrew Feiler, himself a Jewish Georgian, spent three and a half years and drove about 25,000 miles documenting 105 of them for a 2021 book, with a foreword by John Lewis.
Congress has taken notice too. In 2020 Rosenwald's boyhood home in Springfield, part of the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, was renamed in his honour. A 2020 law directed the National Park Service to study how to honour Rosenwald and the schools. In June 2024 the Park Service recommended a national historic site at the San Domingo School in Wicomico County, Maryland, together with a network program to support other surviving schools. New bills to create a Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Schools National Historical Park were introduced in Congress in July 2026.
A lesson in partnership
The Rosenwald schools were never simply a gift from one wealthy man. They were a partnership between a Jewish philanthropist who believed that wealth carried duties, a Black educator with a vision for his people, and thousands of families who gave what little they had so their children could learn.
More than a century later, the surviving schoolhouses still stand along country roads across the South, many cared for by the communities that built them. They are a reminder that when people of different backgrounds share a goal and each does their part, they can build something that lasts for generations.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- If You Build It, They Will Learn, Library of Congress Blog
- Rosenwald Schools, NCpedia / North Carolina History Project
- Jewish photographer makes it his mission to preserve legacy of Rosenwald schools, The Times of Israel
- First National Park Honoring Jewish American Heritage Signed Into Law, National Trust for Historic Preservation
- Rosenwald Schools: updates, National Trust for Historic Preservation
- National Park Service study identifies opportunities for historic designation for Rosenwald Schools, National Park Service
- Rosenwald School, Wikipedia
- Julius Rosenwald, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
