Rosenwald Schools Research Articles

Mapping Rosenwald Schools for African Americans in South Carolina: A Geographic Analysis of Spatial Patterns

In early twentieth-century America, many Blacks in the south had poor access to schooling. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington collaborated to help build schools in the south for Blacks in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper analyzes the geographic patterns of the schools that were built using funds donated by Rosenwald in the state of South Carolina. Some 446 of the 500 Rosenwald schools were located and mapped using a multi-step process, and then data related to these schools were analyzed in four state subregions. Rosenwald schools were built around the state, with relatively more schools built in the northern part of the state compared with the south, where a larger Black population in the south potentially points to less access to schools for Blacks at that time. Rosenwald funds required contributions from other sources, and the state, Blacks, and Whites all contributed. Interestingly, in the south, where there was a higher percentage of Blacks, Whites contributed a larger share towards the building of these schools in comparison with other state regions. The paper thus shows both the process and value of mapping these Rosenwald schools and analyzing this important historical time in South Carolina within a spatial construct.

The Philosophy of Black Education and the Promise of Democratic Organizing

ABSTRACT: To progress toward fulfilling the “promise of democracy” articulated in the 1963 March on Washington requires America’s self-understanding as a diverse people full of tremendous potential and capacity to address our problems. To meet that challenge requires lessons from African American community and cultural organizing in the black freedom movement and the concept of pedagogical personalism from African American education, which affirms the inviolable dignity, worth, and potential of every person. The potential and the dignity of the people came alive in the Rosenwald schools and libraries, which were organized by a network called Jeanes Teachers, some of the most remarkable community organizers in American history. Most of them were educated in HBCUs. This legacy and its vision needs to be put into conversation with community organizing today.

PRESERVING THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION: DIGITAL DOCUMENTATION OF ROSENWALD SCHOOLS – A CASE STUDY ON THE TANKERSLEY SCHOOL IN HOPE HULL, ALABAMA, USA

Abstract. Established across the American South between 1917 and 1932, Rosenwald Schools were crucial for providing education to African American children during segregation. Now, many of these structures are abandoned and deteriorating, in urgent need of digital documentation and preservation. This paper introduces an innovative approach for using Matterport technology to capture immersive virtual tours and enhance Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) with high-resolution imagery. The Tankersley Rosenwald School in Hope Hull, Alabama serves as the case study. Additionally, this paper features traditional Reality Capture techniques, such as Terrestrial Laser Scanning and aerial photogrammetry, in combination with Matterport technology to create a detailed HBIM model of the historic school. This model enables architectural and structural analysis, informing suitable stabilization, conservation, and restoration strategies. It also acts as a powerful visualization tool, allowing stakeholders to safely examine the school's architectural, structural, and historical aspects. The virtual tour produced through Matterport provides valuable data for developing an accurate HBIM model in Revit, leading to more effective conservation approaches. The integration of these technologies showcases the potential for digital preservation of built heritage and emphasizes the importance of innovative methods in cultural heritage documentation. By digitally preserving these historically significant schools, this research supports the conservation and restoration of a vital aspect of African American educational history and raises awareness of their cultural importance.

Estimating the Effect of School Quality on Mortality in the Presence of Migration: Evidence from the Jim Crow South

How does school quality affect health amid multiple behavioral responses? The Rosenwald schools transformed school quality for rural southern African Americans in the early 1900s. Research shows that the schools made black migration northward more likely and that the Great Migration shortened life expectancy for these migrants. Besides the hypothesized health-enhancing effects of school quality, negative health effects might also occur through migration. We disentangle behavioral mechanisms and find complete exposure to the Rosenwald schools increased life expectancy by 2–3 months; a more naive approach finds no relationship. Results are robust to heterogeneous treatment effects and various measurement issues.

There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969)

There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969)

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

Estimating the Effect of School Quality on Mortality in the Presence of Migration: Evidence from the Jim Crow South

We consider the effects of school quality on health using the introduction of the Rosenwald schools which expanded educational opportunities for African Americans living in rural areas of the South during the early part of the 20th century. Prior research has shown that the Great Migration dramatically reduced the life expectancy of blacks who migrated north and prior research has also shown that Rosenwald schooling increased the likelihood of migration out of the South. This clouds measurement of a direct channel between schooling and survival. Because of this, we estimate the effect of the Rosenwald schools on mortality conditional on migration status. We find that addressing the endogenous migration of blacks is empirically important. Even though the advent of Rosenwald schools exogenously increased education, there is no correlation between Rosenwald school exposure and survival. But accounting for the negative impact of migration on survival induced by Rosenwald school exposure, we find that that complete exposure to the Rosenwald schools during childhood increased life expectancy by about two to three months. These findings highlight the importance of interpreting IV results carefully within the instruments historical context when addressing underlying mechanisms.

Closing the gap? The effect of private philanthropy on the provision of African-American schooling in the U.S. south

Long-run labor market inequities are frequently attributed to disparities in primary and secondary school quality, and philanthropists often resort to targeted and tightly conditioned gifts to address these quality disparities. We match data on the Rosenwald Schools Program, an early 20th century initiative aimed at the Southern black–white school quality gap, to newly assembled data on local school districts and measure the impact of Rosenwald gifts on African-American public school resources. Although these gifts increased contemporaneous expenditures on African-American schools, results show that they yielded no lasting change in multiple school quality proxies. Further, because Rosenwald funds were diverted or implicitly matched to favor white schools, we find no evidence that the Fund reduced the black–white gap in superficial school quality. We demonstrate, however, that overall black public education expenditures in this era had a steeper marginal effect on black attendance and literacy measures than white public expenditures had on white outcome measures, which helps to explain why the Rosenwald program led to meaningful human capital gains for black, but not white, individuals despite its failure to impact relative school quality.

What Making a Movie about Rosenwald Schools Taught Me

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.

Review Essay: Recent Additions to the Rosenwald Historiography

This essay reviews two books on Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund and places them within the historiography of the Fund. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, is a biography written by Peter M. Ascoli. The book entitled The Rosenwald Schools of the American South written by Mary S. Hoffschwelle is a study of the rural school-building program with which the Fund is most closely associated. Ascoli's biography joins three other new biographies of early philanthropists that were published in 2006: David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie; Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America by Ruth R. Crocker; and David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life (Katz, p. B6).

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement

The black-white gap in schooling among southern-born men narrowed sharply between the world wars. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 schools were constructed as part of the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative. Using census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural southern blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.

The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement

The Black-White gap in schooling among Southern-born men narrowed sharply between the World Wars. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 schools were constructed as part of the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative. Using Census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural Southern Blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and Northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South

Review: The Rosenwald Schools of the American South, by Mary S. Hoffschwelle and African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary 1865–1945, by Dreck Spurlock Wilson

Review: <i>The Rosenwald Schools of the American South</i>, by Mary S. Hoffschwelle and <i>African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary 1865–1945</i>, by Dreck Spurlock Wilson

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (review)

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (review)

The Rosenwald Schools of the American South

Hoffschwelle tells the story of a remarkable partnership to build model schools for black children during the Jim Crow era in the South. The Rosenwald program, which erected more than 5,300 schools and auxiliary buildings between 1912 and 1932, began with Booker T. Washington, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, who turned for financing to Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. By requiring communities to raise matching funds, the two men inspired a grassroots movement that built schools in 15 southern states. The Rosenwald schools, scores of which still stand, exemplified the ideal educational environment - designed for efficiency, making full use of natural light to protect children's eyesight, and providing sufficient space for learning. Ironically, these schools, which represented the social centers of their African American communities, also helped to set standards for white schools. Though the program's funding ended with Rosenwald's death in 1932, many continued as public institutions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools to its list of America's Most Endangered Historic Places in 2002. Hoffschwelle examines these buildings as exemplars for school architecture and design, as community institutions and partnerships, and as a means of formalizing a state education program that, finally, would include black children. This story of extraordinary generosity and sacrifice will interest scholars of American and African-American history, educators, school planners, and preservationists.

MARY S. HOFFSCHWELLE. The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. (New Perspectives on the History of the South.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2006. Pp. xx, 401. $39.95

MARY S. HOFFSCHWELLE. The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. (New Perspectives on the History of the South.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2006. Pp. xx, 401. $39.95

Mary S. Hoffschwelle.The Rosenwald Schools of the American South.:The Rosenwald Schools of the American South.(New Perspectives on the History of the South.)

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The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (review)

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...