Rosenwald schools: An example of African American commitment to education

Currie Rosenwald School, Pender County, NC (built 1927) Image by Claudia Stack, all rights reserved

Rosenwald schools were schools that were built between 1912 and 1932 by African American communities that received technical and financial assistance from Julius Rosenwald (mostly via the Rosenwald Fund). The Rosenwald Fund contribution, in turn, leveraged support from southern school boards that had been reluctant to build schools for African Americans. Rosenwald schools constitute the most numerous and easily recognizable type of school built by African American communities during the segregation era, but they were by no means the only kind of school built by African Americans during segregation. As the National Park Service notes:

The establishment of public schools in the former slave-holding states owed much to African Americans’ commitment to education. In the former Confederate states, African Americans used their power as voters and legislators to create the frameworks for public education during the late 1860s and 1870s.

The Rosenwald school building effort, structured as a matching grant program, began with a $25,000 gift Julius Rosenwald made in 1912 to Tuskegee in support of teacher training. At the behest of Booker T. Washington and Clinton J. Calloway, Rosenwald allowed $2800 of that money to be used in a pilot program to help communities build small rural schools. From 1912, when…