What Making a Movie about Rosenwald Schools Taught Me

Abstract

In this essay, filmmaker and educator Caroline Stephenson tells how Hurricane Irene started her on a journey to make a documentary about Rosenwald Schools in her native Hertford County, North Carolina. After many years working as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films and television shows, Stephenson moved back to the family farm to raise her children and teach elementary school. She enlisted students from a digital media class at the local high school to assist during the production of the film Children Go Where I Send You. Together, they interviewed alumni from Hertford County’s 10 Rosenwald Schools. The stories told by the alumni, the men and women who attended rain or shine, were living testimony to the vision and foresight of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald. These were children of sharecroppers, and their families had little or no access to cash money or equal opportunities. Rosenwald Schools were prized as the center of the communities in which they were situated. They were the center of black culture in these areas, where people of color could gather without fear, carry on the legacy of those that had come before them, and proudly prepare future generations for self-determination and leadership. It was from the interviews that the significance of these schools and their relevance today became even more apparent. Both the filmmaker and digital media class students came away from this project with a greater understanding of the important connections between past, present, and future.