The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (review)

Abstract

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 150 long enough to have prevented the movement of the two Union corps to Georgia later in the spring. The strengths of this work are many and the weaknesses few. Well written with the virtue of conciseness, it thoroughly discusses the issue at hand without becoming bogged down in minutiae. The author’s analysis is persuasive, and he includes adequate and numerous maps. Sherman’s Mississippi Campaign is a well-researched and well-written study of an often -neglected campaign and should be on the shelves of those interested in the Civil War. DAMON EUBANK Campbellsville University The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. By Mary S. Hoffschwelle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xx, 401 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8130-2957-0. The latest volume in the “New Perspectives on the American South” series from the University Press of Florida, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South tells the remarkable story of interracial public-private cooperation to better public education for African Americans in the South through new school construction. In 1912, Julius Rosenwald, Jewish president of Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Booker T. Washington of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute formed an alliance that transformed public education and the built environment in fifteen states across the South. Riding the progressive era wave of school building, the Rosenwald building program helped construct over five thousand schools. By the time the program ended in 1932, its schools housed a third of the South’s black public school students and teachers, accounted for a fifth of the South’s public schools and just under one third of their property value . They helped dramatically increase school attendance, instructional hours, and literacy among African American southerners. Hoffschwelle, author of Preserving Rosenwald Schools (Washington, D.C., 2003) and Rebuilding the Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900–1930 (Knoxville, 1998), here envisions the Rosenwald building program and schools “as an evolving, multilayered network of people and buildings that produced significant landscapes of identity and social change” (p. 1). Rosenwald Schools explores “the processes by which people create, use, and invest meaning in the material world” (p. 3). Hoffschwelle interprets the program “from the inside out, focused on A P R I L 2 0 0 7 151 the internal development of the building program and looking out from it to the broader arena of black education in the South, to understand its distinctive and enduring power as an agency for change” (p. 2). The Rosenwald program motivated public investment and broader involvement in African American education in the South. In the process , it “created a stage upon which many different people could act” (p. 2). Rosenwald preferred matching grants to, as Hoffschwelle puts it, “philanthropy that relieved local people and governments of their own responsibilities” (p. 82). Of the moneys expended on the Rosenwald schools, 64 percent came from tax revenues, 17 percent from African Americans, 15 percent from Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund, and just over 4 percent from other private white donors. Concerned about a lack of professionalism and efficiency at Tuskegee, Rosenwald moved the program to Nashville in 1920 and placed it under the control of white officials. The progressives now in charge stressed the need for “model” schools. The change resulted in increasingly expensive plans that taxed the ability of the neediest black communities to match Rosenwald grants (p. 83). Thus, impoverished African American communities were doubly taxed to build schools for which their taxes should have provided. That so many embraced “sacrificial giving” confirmed their active and enduring commitment to “education as a cultural value and a social right” (p. 17). Rosenwald’s death in 1932 ended the program , forcing new school advocates to seek federal funding. Hoffschwelle stresses the program’s meaning for African Americans. A Rosenwald school building constituted a “new modern place in a southern African American community,” a symbol of “collective achievement ” expressing “not only the architectural vision of its planners but the community vision of the people who used its spaces” (pp. 245, 259). Communities named most Rosenwald schools...