ALABAMA HERITAGE
  • Magazine
    • Current and Back Issues >
      • Back Issues 141-150 >
        • Issue 147, Winter 2023
        • Issue 146, Fall 2022
        • Issue 145, Summer 2022
        • Issue 144, Spring 2022
        • Issue 143, Winter 2022
        • Issue 142, Fall 2021
        • Issue 141, Summer 2021
      • Back Issues 131-140 >
        • Issue 140, Spring 2021
        • Issue 139, Winter 2021
        • Issue 138, Fall 2020
        • Issue 137, Summer 2020
        • Issue 136, Spring 2020
        • Issue 135, Winter 2020
        • Issue 134, Fall 2019
        • Issue 133, Summer 2019
        • Issue 132 Spring 2019
        • Issue 131, Winter 2019
      • Back Issues 121-130 >
        • Issue 130, Fall 2018
        • Issue 129, Summer 2018
        • Issue 128, Spring 2018
        • Issue 127, Winter 2018
        • Issue 126, Fall 2017
        • Issue 125 Summer 2017
        • Issue 124, Spring 2017
        • Issue 123, Winter 2017
        • Issue 122, Fall 2016
        • Issue 121, Summer 2016
      • Back Issues 111-120 >
        • Issue 120, Spring 2016
        • Issue 119, Winter 2016
        • Issue 118, Fall 2015
        • Issue 117, Summer 2015
        • Issue 116, Spring 2015
        • Issue 115, Winter 2015
        • Issue 114, Fall 2014
        • Issue 113, Summer 2014
        • Issue 112, Spring 2014
        • Issue 111, Winter 2014
      • Back Issues 101-110 >
        • Issue 110, Fall 2013
        • Issue 109, Summer 2013
        • Issue 108, Spring 2013
        • Issue 107, Winter 2013
        • Issue 106, Fall 2012
        • Issue 105, Summer 2012
        • Issue 104, Spring 2012
        • Issue 103, Winter 2012
        • Issue 102, Fall 2011
        • Issue 101, Summer 2011
      • Back Issues 91-100 >
        • Issue 100, Spring 2011
        • Issue 99, Winter 2011
        • Issue 98, Fall 2010
        • Issue 97, Summer 2010
        • Issue 96, Spring 2010
        • Issue 95, Winter 2010
        • Issue 94, Fall 2009
        • Issue 93, Summer 2009
        • Issue 92, Spring 2009
        • Issue 91, Winter 2009
      • Back Issues 81-90 >
        • Issue 90, Fall 2008
        • Issue 89, Summer 2008
        • Issue 88, Spring 2008
        • Issue 87, Winter 2008
        • Issue 86, Fall 2007
        • Issue 85, Summer 2007
        • Issue 84, Spring 2007
        • Issue 83, Winter 2007
        • Issue 82, Fall 2006
        • Issue 81, Summer 2006
      • Back Issues 71-80 >
        • Issue 80, Spring 2006
        • Issue 79, Winter 2006
        • Issue 78, Fall 2005
        • Issue 77, Summer 2005
        • Issue 76, Spring 2005
        • Issue 75, Winter 2005
        • Issue 74, Fall 2004
        • Issue 73, Summer 2004
        • Issue 72, Spring 2004
        • Issue 71, Winter 2004
      • Back Issues 61-70 >
        • Issue 70, Fall 2003
        • Issue 69, Summer 2003
        • Issue 68, Spring 2003
        • Issue 67, Winter 2003
        • Issue 66, Fall 2002
        • Issue 65, Summer 2002
        • Issue 64, Spring 2002
        • Issue 63, Winter 2002
        • Issue 62, Fall 2001
        • Issue 61, Summer 2001
      • Back Issues 51-60 >
        • Issue 60, Spring 2001
        • Issue 59, Winter 2001
        • Issue 58, Fall 2000
        • Issue 57, Summer 2000
        • Issue 56, Spring 2000
        • Issue 55, Winter 2000
        • Issue 54, Fall 1999
        • Issue 53, Summer 1999
        • Issue 52, Spring 1999
        • Issue 51, Winter 1999
      • Back Issues 41-50 >
        • Issue 50, Fall 1998
        • Issue 49, Summer 1998
        • Issue 48, Spring 1998
        • Issue 47, Winter 1998
        • Issue 46, Fall 1997
        • Issue 45, Summer 1997
        • Issue 44, Spring 1997
        • Issue 43, Winter 1997
        • Issue 42, Fall 1996
        • Issue 41, Summer 1996
      • Back Issues 31-40 >
        • Issue 40, Spring 1996
        • Issue 39, Winter 1996
        • Issue 38, Fall 1995
        • Issue 37, Summer 1995
        • Issue 36, Spring 1995
        • Issue 35, Winter 1995
        • Issue 34, Fall 1994
        • Issue 33, Summer 1994
        • Issue 32, Spring 1994
        • Issue 31, Winter 1994
      • Back Issues 21-30 >
        • Issue 30, Fall 1993
        • Issue 29, Summer 1993
        • Issue 28, Spring 1993
        • Issue 27, Winter 1993
        • Issue 26, Fall 1992
        • Issue 25, Summer 1992
        • Issue 24, Spring 1992
        • Issue 23, Winter 1992
        • Issue 22, Fall 1991
        • Issue 21, Summer 1991
      • Back Issues 11-20 >
        • Issue 20, Spring 1991
        • Issue 19, Winter 1991
        • Issue 18, Fall 1990
        • Issue 17, Summer 1990
        • Issue 16, Spring 1990
        • Issue 15, Winter 1990
        • Issue 14, Fall 1989
        • Issue 13, Summer 1989
        • Issue 12, Spring 1989
        • Issue 11, Winter 1989
      • Back Issues 1-10 >
        • Issue 10, Fall 1988
        • Issue 9, Summer 1988
        • Issue 8, Spring 1988
        • Issue 7, Winter 1988
        • Issue 6, Fall 1987
        • Issue 5, Summer 1987
        • Issue 4, Spring 1987
        • Issue 3, Winter 1987
        • Issue 2, Fall 1986
        • Issue 1, Summer 1986
    • Digital Features
    • Links of Interest
    • Bonus Materials >
      • Adventures in Genealogy
      • Alabama Heritage Blog
      • Alabama Territory
      • Becoming Alabama >
        • Creek War Era
        • Civil War Era
        • Civil Rights Movement
      • From the Vault
      • History in Ruins
      • Places in Peril
      • Recipes
  • Online Store
    • Customer Service
  • About Us
    • Awards
    • Meet Our Team
    • News
    • Writer's Guidelines and Submissions
  • Search
  • Donate
Published by The University of Alabama,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Rosenwald Schools: 100 Years of Pride, Progress, and Preservation

7/7/2018

 
Tuskegee Institute Board of Trustees
Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (seated third from the left, next to Booker T. Washington) served on the Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute. (Photo Courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History)
​This year marks a year-long centennial celebration of the Rosenwald rural school building program. This program has been described as “one of the most ambitious school building programs ever witnessed in the United States.” And it all began in Alabama as a collaboration between a nationally renowned educator and a prominent businessman. 
White Renovated Building (Shiloh Rosenwald School)This photograph shows Macon County's Shiloh Rosenwald School in 2010, after it underwent extensive restoration. (Photo Courtesy of Dorothy Walker)
The concept of building small rural schools for blacks originated with Booker T. Washington and the staff at Tuskegee Institute’s Extension Department at the start of the twentieth century. Julius Rosenwald, CEO of Sears and Roebuck, invested in this rural “school construction campaign” substantially, thereby helping to construct more than five thousand buildings in 883 counties in fifteen southern states between 1912 and 1932 and filling a desperate need. Alabama’s 1875 constitution imposed school segregation, and the 1901 constitution subsequently allowed local school boards to distribute state school funds, much of which were diverted to white schools. Therefore, blacks often held classes in rented homes, churches, lodge halls, or in abandoned shacks and houses. In 1910, two years before the Rosenwald School building program began, 61 percent of the black schools in Alabama were housed in such structures. In the same year, only about 60 percent of black children between ages six and fourteen in sixteen southern states attended school. Up until 1910, the school term for blacks in Alabama was less than five months.
 
Beginning in 1904, Washington and Tuskegee extension director Clinton J. Calloway used philanthropic funding to develop a public school building program for blacks in Macon County. Over the next five years, Washington and Calloway used funding from Standard Oil baron Henry Huttleson Rogers to construct forty-six schools for blacks in Macon County. When Rogers died in 1909, Washington began looking for another major benefactor who would invest in and help expand the rural school construction program. In 1911, while speaking in Chicago, Washington met Julius Rosenwald. He was one of the most famous and influential businessmen of his time and had recently expanded his philanthropy to African American causes.
 
Washington added Rosenwald to Tuskegee’s Board of Trustees and began to cultivate him as a successor to Rogers in the school building project. But he discreetly allowed the idea to unfold as Rosenwald’s own plan. The two men began exchanging views about a new rural school construction program that would combine outside philanthropy with community self-help to leverage public investment in black education.
 
Under the direction of the Extension Department of Tuskegee Institute, Washington and Calloway constructed six experimental schools in and around Macon County. These were built to designs by Robert R. Taylor, staff architect and director of industries at Tuskegee, and were completed the spring of 1914. The success of these first experimental schools convinced Rosenwald to support an expanded program that would be overseen by Tuskegee.
 
The term “Rosenwald School” became an identifying label in which “Rosenwald” served as an adjective to distinguish it from other “colored” schools. No doubt some people mistakenly thought that the Rosenwald designation meant that Julius Rosenwald had paid for the building in its entirety.
 
Although Rosenwald’s contribution was substantial, the fund generally contributed an average of about one-sixth of the total monetary cost of the building, grounds, and equipment. Most of the cash, raised either through private contributions or public tax funds, came from rural black citizens themselves. Their additional contributions in the form of land, labor, and building materials were also substantial. Generally, too, they provided ongoing maintenance.
 
This type of school building construction was unprecedented in the development of education in the South. Rosenwald schools meant better schoolhouses, trained teachers, improved health conditions, and in some cases, bus transportation. The schools were frequently the most attractive public building in the district and became a social center for blacks.
 
Tuskegee developed a set of standardized plans in a pamphlet entitled The Negro Rural School and its Relation to the Community, from which communities could choose an appropriate design. One common feature, and a character- defining element in identifying Rosenwald schools today, was high, spacious windows grouped to maximize natural lighting and air circulation. The plans also addressed sanitation and moisture control.
 
All schools were expected to designate a room that was utilized for industrial training. But Rosenwald schools were identified not by the number of classrooms but by the number of teachers. Thus a “one teacher school” meant that a building would have two rooms, “two teacher schools” meant a building had three rooms, and so on. The most common school constructed in Alabama was Floorplan #20—a two-teacher type school. It is also the most common of the remaining schools so far documented.
 
Booker T. Washington died in 1915, but the school building program continued to be administered by Tuskegee until 1920. At that time Rosenwald decided to establish a central administration at Nashville, Tennessee, under the direction of S. L. Smith. Smith updated Tuskegee’s designs and provided additional plans in a second publication entitled Community School Plans.
 
To measure the impact of the Rosenwald fund on the education of black southerners, one need only look at the statistics. In 1932 a quarter of all black school children in the South were taught in Rosenwald Schools. And when the building program ended in the same year, one in five African American school buildings in the South was a Rosenwald school.
 
Although Alabama saw the construction of the first eighty Rosenwald schools, the state ultimately ranked sixth overall in the number of buildings constructed with assistance from the Rosenwald fund. Between 1913 and 1932, 407 schools, shops, and teacher homes were built in the state. Of these, less than ten percent have been documented as still standing.
 
As rural schools began to close in the 1950s and 1960s, especially after integration, many communities held onto their Rosenwald schools as markers of communal spirit. Today the surviving Rosenwald schools, teachers’ homes, and vocational training buildings symbolize both the vision of Washington and Rosenwald and, more generally, the historic struggle of blacks for educational opportunities in a segregated South.

As rural schools began to close in the 1950s and 1960s, especially after integration, many communities held onto their Rosenwald schools as markers of communal spirit. Today the surviving Rosenwald schools, teachers’ homes, and vocational training buildings symbolize both the vision of Washington and Rosenwald and, more generally, the historic struggle of blacks for educational opportunities in a segregated South.
In 2002 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald schools to their annual roster of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. Between 2007 and 2010, the Lowe’s Charitable and Educational Foundation partnered with the Trust to provide matching grants ($40,000-50,000) to assist Rosenwald school restoration projects across the South. Nearly $2 million from Lowe’s has gone toward this eff ort to reclaim some surviving Rosenwald schools for viable community uses.
 
Four Alabama Rosenwald schools received grants from Lowe’s. Two of the schools restored with help from these funds are the Shiloh Rosenwald School in Notasulga, Macon County, and the Tunstall (Emory) Rosenwald School near Cedarville, in Hale County. Both communities now use the buildings as multipurpose meeting spaces.
 
Former students, teachers, and community leaders recently erected a historical marker for the Rosenwald School in Loachapoka in Lee County, widely believed to be the first Rosenwald School. Alumni of the school recalled their memories in a printed brochure distributed at the event. One former student, Charlie Ezell, recalled that he “helped make fires in the pot bellied stove.” Another student, Barbara Ervin, recalled, “My fourth grade teacher Miss Rebecca Jones had heard of a remedy to cure my asthma.” Student Judy Lockhart remembered that “all of our books were so worn that the pages would sometimes fall out as you turned the pages. But we respected each book for the next year’s class…. Walking to school sometimes our paper would get wet if it rained really hard.”
 
The Tuskegee University conference on June 14-16, 2012, will draw participants from across the nation. It will convene alumni, community leaders, historians, and preservationists to discuss the significance of the Rosenwald school movement and strategies for preserving both the remaining schools and their associated stories. This centennial event will strengthen the national Rosenwald network by linking alumni and preservationists throughout the rural South. The conference will include sessions about grant writing; exhibit and museum development; promotion and marketing; records conservation; partnership building; and creative reuse for Rosenwald schools. Individuals wanting more information about the history of Rosenwald schools can go online to www.rosenwaldschools.com. To get information on a specific school, individuals may visit the Rosenwald School database at Fisk University: rosenwald.fisk.edu. The database contains information from the Fisk University library where the Rosenwald School Building Fund collection is archived. Individuals wanting information on documented Rosenwald schools in Alabama, or wishing to provide information on a school in their community, can contact Dorothy Walker at dorothy.walker@preserveala.org or at (334) 230-2665. ​

This feature was previously published in Issue 104, Spring 2012.

About the Author
Dorothy Walker coordinates the documentation of Rosenwald Schools for the Alabama Historical Commission and serves as Alabama’s representative on the National Trust for Historic Preservation Rosenwald School Initiative and Task Force. Robert Gamble, standing editor of the “Southern Architecture and Preservation” department of Alabama Heritage, is senior architectural historian for the Alabama Historical Commission.
Subscribe to Alabama Heritage

Comments are closed.

    From the Vault

    Read complete classic articles and departments featured in Alabama Heritage magazine in the past 35 years of publishing. You'll find in-depth features along with quirky and fun departments that cover the people, places, and events that make our state great!

    Read More From the Vault

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    August 2022
    June 2022
    February 2022
    June 2021
    May 2021
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    April 2015
    July 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    October 2012
    July 2012
    October 2009

    Categories

    All
    African Americans
    Agriculture
    Alabama
    Archeaology
    Architecture
    Avondale
    Avondale Zoo
    Birmingham
    Business
    Cathedral Caverns
    Civil War
    Constitution
    Cuba
    Episcopal Church
    Food
    Guntersville
    Hollywood
    Hunting
    Murder
    Mystery
    National Guard
    Native American
    Nursing
    Photography
    Poarch Creek Indians
    Politics
    Preservation
    Quilts
    Religion
    Revolutionary War
    Sand Mountain
    Whiskey
    Women
    WWI
    WWII

    RSS Feed

Online Store
​Customer Service
Meet Our Team
Board of Directors
Corporate Sponsors
News
Join Our Email List

Employment
UA Disclaimer
UA Privacy Policy ​
​Website comments or questions?  

Email ah.online@ua.edu
Published by The University of Alabama, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History
​Alabama Heritage
Box 870342
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Local: (205) 348-7467
Toll-Free: (877) 925-2323
Fax: (205) 348-7473

alabama.heritage@ua.edu