Rosenwald Schools taught a generation of early civil rights leaders across the South
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At the turn of the 20th century, Black children were barred from public schools, and many Southern states would not allocate funding to educate them. A revolutionary education program called the Rosenwald Schools built new schoolhouses all across the Southeast for Black children, and the remnants of these schools can still be seen in Northern Virginia and Maryland.
The Rosenwald School building program was the brainchild of former slave and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, and Julius Rosenwald, who was the president of the Sears and Roebuck Company.
“These two men create this program where they engage Black communities and white school boards. … From 1912 to 1937, it builds 4,978 schools across 15 Southern and border states, and the results are transformative,” Andrew Feiler, a photographer and author, told WTOP.
Feiler’s photographs capturing surviving Rosenwald Schools will be on display at the National Building Museum in D.C. starting Feb. 28 through the end of the year.
He said these schools were revolutionary for the time.
In the early 20th century, “There was a large and persistent Black-white education gap in the South,” Feiler said. “That gap closes precipitously between World War I and World War II, and the single greatest driver of that achievement is Rosenwald Schools.”
Reaching across long divides ‘fundamentally changed this country for the better’
Jeff Clark, a public historian in Fairfax County, Virginia, called the schools “game changing.”
“It was hope in a time where kids didn’t have a lot of hope, families didn’t have a lot of hope. It’s hard for me to explain what that must have felt like,” he said.
Many of the vital leaders during the Civil Rights Movement were educated at these schools, including activist Medgar Evers, author Maya Angelou and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.
“What you realize is that these schools helped create the educational foundation, the economic foundation that helped the Civil Rights Movement happen when it happened,” Feiler said.
The vast majority of Rosenwald Schools were small, one to four-teacher schools. The African American community did not receive bus service from the public school system, so the schools had to serve an area where students could walk there, which led to smaller school sizes.
Only around 500 of these Rosenwald School buildings are left standing in the U.S. Many have been repurposed into city buildings maintained as part of a school system or restored and turned into museums like the Ridgeley School in Capitol Heights, Maryland.
Maryland was home to over 150 Rosenwald Schools; Virginia was home to more than 380.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, before the Rosenwald Schools were built, “if you were African American, your education stopped at grade seven, unless you could afford to pay tuition to go to Washington, D.C., or you had a family member who lived in Washington, D.C., who had an address you could use,” Clark said.
At the turn of the 20th century, “there were not a lot of school buildings constructed for African American children,” Clark said.
Four Rosenwald Schools were built in Fairfax County, which at the time was a much more rural farming community than it is today.
One was built in Fairfax City, not far from George Mason’s campus, another called Guilford in Tysons Corner. The Oak Grove Community on the border of Loudoun County was built in the 1930s and the Seminary Rosenwald School in Alexandria was replaced by T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School.
“It was hope for communities who had no hope because the county was spending all its money to build new brick and mortar buildings for white children in Annandale and McLean,” Clark said.
According to Clark, the expertly designed school plans developed at the Tuskegee Institute laid out blueprints for schools of different sizes and focused on details that are still being used today.
“About 20 years ago, FCPS got really interested in natural light. How can we bring more natural light into our buildings? Because that’s so important for kids,” Clark said.
“They were talking about that 100 years ago at the Tuskegee Institute, they gave specific instructions for, here’s a plan for the building that will fit the size of your lot. Here is how you should orient that building on your lot to maximize the use of natural light for those kids,” he added.
Feiler said the creation of these schools is a lesson everyone in America can learn from.
“Julius Rosenwald, a white, Northern, Jewish businessman, and Booker T. Washington, a Black, Southern Christian educator, were reaching across divides of race, of religion, and of region; in 1912 in a deeply segregated, deeply Jim Crow America, and they fundamentally changed this country for the better,” Feiler said.
“I think the heart of this story speaks to everybody walking in the streets today, crying out for change, that we are the change, that individual actions matter and that we do change the world,” he added.