The school buildings themselves are one of the many innovative features of the Rosenwald program. In the early twentieth century, Progressive architects applied new ideas about pedagogy and health to school design and developed new standards to evaluate school plans. Their concerns included lighting, ventilation, heating, sanitation, instructional needs, and aesthetics—all intended to create positive, orderly, and healthy environments for learning. Most of these designers and plans focused on urban schools, however. The designers of Rosenwald schools applied the same Progressive principles to country schools, and in so doing made the Rosenwald school building program a major force in rural school design. Furthermore, the Rosenwald school building program chose a bold strategy: to create school buildings for African American children that would serve as models for all rural schools.

TUSKEGEE PLANS, 1913-1920
Clinton J. Calloway and staff members of Tuskegee’s mechanical industries and architecture programs developed the initial Rosenwald building plans, which appeared in the Institute’s 1915 publication, The Negro Rural School and Its Relation to the Community.

The Negro Rural School featured three building types: a one-teacher school, a central (consolidated) school, and a county training school. These Tuskegee-designed schools are easily distinguished from later Rosenwald buildings. They feature hipped and clipped-gable rooflines and central entrances protected by projecting gable or shed porch roofs. The batteries of windows that provide the major light source for instructional rooms group five to seven double-hung sash windows, and pairs of these windows pierce the other sides of the building as well. Reflecting the Tuskegee-style curriculum intended for these schools, the plans include space for industrial education, most often providing a smaller classroom for girls’ domestic science work as part of the school building and locating boys’ vocational work in a separate structure.

Tuskegee’s plans also introduced many features that would be repeated in later Rosenwald schools. The smallest design was for a one-teacher school, but it was not a one-room school. Throughout the rest of its existence the Rosenwald program would continue to classify its buildings by the number of teachers, rather than the number of rooms, to emphasize that its schools provided work rooms, cloak rooms, and, in larger schools, auditoriums and offices as well. Thus the one-teacher school included a classroom for academic instruction, a smaller industrial classroom, a kitchen, a library, and cloakrooms.

Lighting and ventilation, two critical aspects of Progressive school design, also received serious attention from the start. All Tuskegee designs grouped windows into “batteries” to maximize the effect of natural light in the interior and raised the building on short piers for ventilation and moisture control. Progressive educators believed that schools should serve as community centers and that small rural schools should be consolidated into single larger facilities, in part to support an expanded curriculum, but also to create a sense of community between neighboring districts. Even the one-teacher school plan called for folding doors between the workroom and classroom that could be opened to create a larger space for special events, and provided for a future classroom addition.

The larger central school plan arranged a school building, a separate industrial building for blacksmithing and carpentry, and a teacher’s home within a larger site that included practice farm plots. Tuskegee provided two alternative floor plans for one and two-story structures.
The county training school was a special type of school that received funding from the John F. Slater Fund. Originally conceived as schools that would prepare rural black teachers and promote industrial education, the county training schools developed into high schools with strong academic programs as well.

COMMUNITY SCHOOL PLANS, 1920-1928
When Julius Rosenwald and Rosenwald Fund staff began to question Tuskegee’s management of the building program, they hired Fletcher B. Dresslar, professor of school hygiene and architecture at Nashville’s George Peabody College for Teachers, to assess the plans and structures. Dresslar was one of the few educational professionals committed to rural school design, the author of two bulletins on the subject for the U.S. Bureau of Education. In his 1920 Report on the Rosenwald School Buildings, Dresslar lambasted the structures that he had inspected. The Tuskegee plans were adequate but did not meet Dresslar’s standards for lighting, ventilation, and sanitation. Worse yet, county school officials and contractors altered the plans at will and bought cheap materials to stretch construction dollars further. When local citizens did the work, they often were not skilled carpenters and had little or no supervision, so they made mistakes in interpreting the plans. Dresslar recommended that the Rosenwald Fund require more on-site supervision and complete adherence to its designs as conditions of financial assistance. He also called for new plans that would better address his concerns for lighting and ventilation, and allow for an auditorium and future classroom additions.

Dresslar’s critique was part of the rationale behind the removal of the building program from Tuskegee and the creation of the Nashville office. He and Samuel L. Smith, the new building program director and Dresslar’s former student, prepared the plans that would become the archetypal Rosenwald schools of the 1920s and early 1930s. The Rosenwald Fund published the designs, titled Community School Plans, repeatedly from 1920 until 1931. Some of the Community School Plans incorporated and upgraded the Tuskegee designs, and others reflected contemporary school designs for white rural schools and the plans that Dresslar and Smith had previously collaborated on for the Tennessee Department of Education. The Community School Plans also eliminated some features of the Tuskegee designs: gable roofs replaced the hipped and clipped-gable rooflines, and the plans were exclusively for one-story structures.

Dresslar and Smith were especially concerned about lighting and the conservation of children’s eyesight. Accordingly, they limited windows to one side of a classroom, which would reduce eyestrain by ensuring that a single stream of light falling from left to right would illuminate the blackboard and desks. In addition, the Community School Plans maximized natural light by using narrower window framing in the sashes and much taller windows that stretched from the interior wainscot cap up to the eaves. Another of Dresslar’s concerns was ventilation. “Breeze" windows set high under the eaves or on interior walls also provided cross ventilation by pulling air from the windows across the room and into a hallway or adjacent classroom. In addition to sliding doors and removable blackboards to open up interior space, the larger schools in Community School Plans included dedicated auditoriums for school and community events.

Rosenwald schools also had their own color schemes, and specific requirements for interior appointments. Especially in the early years of the building program, school façades were often painted with a nut brown or “bungalow” stain and white trim; white with gray trim and light gray with white trim were also recommended. Interior paint schemes employed bands of color to accentuate the effect of the battery windows on light levels and students’ vision. Walnut or oak-stained wainscoting ran along the lower section of classroom walls, surmounted by gray or buff painted walls and light cream or ivory ceilings. The resulting horizontal bands of color reflected and intensified natural light entering from the windows set above the wainscot, while the darker wainscot minimized glare at desk level for seated pupils. Light tan and translucent window shades also aided in controlling light levels.

School equipment received the same careful scrutiny to ensure that the building could have the greatest impact on its occupants. Blackboards along three walls served the teacher for instruction and students for practice assignments. Modern patent desks replaced the rough wooden slabs, pews, and benches typical of many other black schools. Often African American community members found it difficult to pay for patent desks in addition to their contribution to the building and asked to be relieved of this burden. White school officials would have preferred to transfer used furnishings from white schools over to black ones. However, the Rosenwald Fund remained firm and refused to make final payment on buildings that did not meet its standards for the exterior or interior.

Schools built according to Community School Plans are the most easily recognized Rosenwald schools. Rosenwald building facades generally were as simple as possible, limiting decorative details to a bare minimum that might suggest the Mission or Colonial Revival styles familiar from early twentieth-century residential neighborhoods. Simplicity was a key Progressive design concept denoting order, rationality, and functionalism. It also served to make these buildings more affordable, modern in appearance when compared to the vernacular buildings they replaced, and modest in comparison with white schools.

SHOPS AND TEACHERS’ HOMES
From the beginning, Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald envisioned schools that would become focal points of their communities. Rosenwald shop buildings and teachers’ homes associated with larger schools helped to make them centers of community life by offering practical instruction that would attract both students and parents from surrounding districts, and attracting better-qualified principals and teachers who would become local leaders. Tuskegee’s shop and home designs blended with its school building plans and the rural built environment. Three-room and five-room plans for teacher’s “cottages” were simple homes with front and back porches. They featured large kitchens that could double as home economics classrooms. Double doors were recommended between the living and dining rooms in the larger floor plan for club and community gatherings.

Although Tuskegee Institute distributed plans for teachers’ homes and shops, these structures were not part of the Rosenwald building program at this time. Experience proved that local school boards resisted spending additional funds for these facilities at African American schools. Consequently, beginning in 1920, the Fund offered to pay 50 percent of the cost of a teachers’ home at schools with at least an eight-month term. Initially the grant could run as much as $1,000 but in 1922 the Fund scaled its maximum award back to $900. In 1927, Fund officials sanctioned grants of between $200 and $400 for shops if built according to Rosenwald plans, fully equipped, and properly staffed. No doubt these provisions reflected their awareness that the industrial rooms inside Rosenwald schools were often not used for their intended purpose.

PRIVIES AND WELL HOUSES
Improved sanitation for better health was a major concern of all of the Rosenwald school planners in the 1910s and early 1920s, when few rural schools boasted any sort of toilets. Tuskegee’s Negro Rural School publication included illustrations of well houses to keep the water supply secure and clean, and both bucket and pit privies. Community School Plans likewise included plans for pit privies that could accommodate several students and had tall screens protecting the entrances for privacy. The 1931 Community School Plans did include provisions for indoor plumbing, although the planners acknowledged that pit privies would remain essential for schools with no access to or funds for a piped water supply.

ROSENWALD SCHOOLS USING OTHER PLANS
Not all Rosenwald schools followed the Tuskegee or Community School Plans. The Rosenwald program only required an “approved plan,” despite periodic suggestions that its grants be limited to structures following its own designs. Some schools followed designs developed by state departments of education. For example, in South Carolina, the Union County school superintendent reported constructing several Rosenwald schools in the late 1910s according to plans developed by R.E. Lee at the Clemson Agricultural College (now Clemson University). Others probably copied plans developed by architects for other schools, or commissioned their own.

Some of these atypical Rosenwald schools are large, two- and three-story buildings located in cities, rather than the one-story structures usually found in rural neighborhoods. They received Rosenwald aid because they served as the only secondary schools for African Americans in a given county, and were sponsored by county rather than city school boards. Thus the Paul Lawrence Dunbar School in Fort Myers, Florida, was built as Lee County’s only four-year secondary school for African Americans in 1927. Designed by L. N. Iredell, its gleaming white stucco and Spanish Mission Revival styling are a far cry from Tuskegee or Rosenwald Fund plans. In 1929, the Julius Rosenwald Fund translated this practice into an official policy that allowed towns to apply for construction grants to build schools that offered at least two years of high school and vocational instruction for both genders, further accelerating the trend toward larger schools. Even the name of the building program changed as a result, from the rural school program to the southern school program.

OTHER SCHOOLS USING ROSENWALD PLANS
To complicate matters further, not all schools built according to the Community School Plans were Rosenwald schools, or historically African American schools. One of the motivations for publishing the Tuskegee plans and the Community School Plans was to give these rural school designs a broader audience, and to encourage local school authorities to incorporate Progressive design standards into rural school construction projects. Especially after 1920, the Rosenwald Fund portrayed its plans as model designs for any rural school. Nashville office staff gave away design pamphlets and blueprints to state departments of education and local school boards. Because the plans were widely circulated, met contemporary standards of rural school design, and were relatively inexpensive to build, some county boards of education used the Rosenwald plans to build schools for black children for which they did not receive Rosenwald aid, and others used the plans to build schools for white children.

THE ROSENWALD SCHOOL IN THE LANDSCAPE
One of the reasons that the Rosenwald program required a minimum two-acre site was to create a new landscape with the school as its focal point, ideally surrounded by the shop and teachers’ home as well as a playground, practice garden, well, and privies. Practice garden and farm plots were supposed to support the industrial training offered at Rosenwald schools, but these sites also modeled proper landscaping for rural homes. Tuskegee’s Negro Rural School publication recommended flowering plants, fences, and lawns as well as an agricultural demonstration plot. Community School Plans likewise included advice on walkways, lawns, shrubs, and trees. Several years after the Rosenwald building program ended, the landscapes that it had created still concerned the officials of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. S. L. Smith published two bulletins in 1936 that, like the Rosenwald Fund’s earlier publications, addressed the needs of African American schools but could also apply to all rural schools: Improvement and Beautification of Rural Schools and Suggestions for Landscaping Rural Schools. Thus, documenting and preserving a Rosenwald school may not be limited to a single structure, but include a range of site features that make up the Rosenwald school landscape.

Just as important as the Rosenwald Fund’s planned buildings and landscapes is the way that Rosenwald schools fit into existing African American landscapes. Sometimes the Rosenwald buildings were “open-country” schools in an agricultural setting of fields, fences, hedges, and woods close to the places where parents worked. In many more instances, the Rosenwald school sat adjacent to or near a church. That congregation and its minister may have spearheaded the local building campaign, or donated the land. Rosenwald schools located in towns and cities are part of larger African American built environments that may include churches, cemeteries, lodge buildings, and funeral homes, as well as residential structures. Furthermore, a Rosenwald school may be located on the site of an earlier African American school that dates as far back as the 1860s. These schools represent a tradition of African American education since the Reconstruction era as much as they exemplify the innovations of Progressive school design. The preservation of a Rosenwald building is not complete without a full consideration of its context in the landscapes of African American life in the early twentieth-century South.

ROSENWALD SCHOOLS CHANGE DIRECTION, 1928-32
In 1928 the Rosenwald Fund commissioned a design from Frank Lloyd Wright for a school in Hampton, Virginia. Wright seems to have been eager to put his own stamp on the Rosenwald program, whose designs he disparaged as “Yankee things” unsuited to their African American users’ cultural traditions. However, his own design was never built because, he alleged, it was “Not Colonial.”

Wright’s complaint was not fully justified. By the end of the 1920s, Fund officials had become convinced that their designs needed updating, but not necessarily more Colonial Revival details. They hired Walter McCornack, a prominent school architect from Cleveland, Ohio, to undertake a complete review of the Community School Plans as well as of the plans submitted for the industrial high schools. Some of the resulting proposals for larger buildings included more elaborate detailing, such as lanterns, meant to invoke the South’s colonial Georgian architectural heritage. Embree and the Chicago staff rejected what they called “belfries” and “frills,” however, and the schools maintained their restrained styling.

At the same time, Fund officials experimented with new incentives, like the urban industrial schools, and cut out small schools. Since 1928, the Rosenwald Fund had offered a 50 percent increase in aid for “permanent” (generally brick) construction, which tended to favor the large plans. A similar incentive went to school buildings in “backward” counties, where African Americans comprised less than 5 percent (after 1931, 10 percent) of the population and no Rosenwald building had yet been constructed, to attract counties that had not yet responded to the program. Meanwhile, grant amounts for schools up to six teachers had been cut in 1927 to encourage larger consolidated elementary and secondary schools. Aid to one-teacher buildings, which had been cut from $500 to $200, ended completely in 1930, and grants for two-teacher buildings and additions to existing Rosenwald schools stopped in 1931.

The Rosenwald Fund staff and trustees obviously were winding down the school construction program. In part their decision to move away from the building program was based on the Rosenwald Fund’s philosophy and changing priorities. Rosenwald, Edwin Embree and the board of trustees felt that if they continued construction grants indefinitely, southern school boards would remain dependent on Rosenwald aid and contributions from local African Americans and continue to shirk their full responsibility for black public schools. They also wanted to redirect resources toward rural school instruction, higher education, public health, and race relations projects. The stock market crash and ensuing economic depression, which wiped out much of the value of the Sears, Roebuck stock that supported the Rosenwald Fund, only increased the pressure to abandon the building program. In 1932 Edwin Embree and Samuel Smith announced that no further construction grants would be forthcoming, to the dismay of communities still waiting for their chance at a Rosenwald school.

LEGACY
The building plans have their own architectural legacy. Fletcher Dresslar, Samuel Smith, and other state education officials who had studied with Dresslar made Rosenwald schools the nucleus of a movement to reform all southern school architecture. They created the Interstate School Building Service in 1928 with financial support from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Rosenwald school plans, and other school designs based on them, can be seen throughout the ISBS school plan book, For Better Schoolhouses, published in 1929.

Even after the Rosenwald school building program ended in 1932, the Rosenwald Fund and the ISBS kept reprinting and distributing the plans. Consequently, during the Great Depression, when the federal government made funds available for school construction under the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and New Deal agencies like the Works Projects Administration, many southern communities built with the now-familiar Rosenwald designs. The Delight, Arkansas, school building still bears its WPA plaque on the front of its Rosenwald-plan structure.

Another sort of legacy is the school that still carries the Rosenwald name but on a new structure. In the late 1940s and 1950s, southern states undertook massive school building campaigns in hopes of forestalling legal challenges to public school segregation. Desegregation, integration, and new building standards inspired further new school construction that inherited the Rosenwald name. While not technically a Rosenwald school, its association with the earlier Rosenwald program and the survival of the Rosenwald name proclaims its importance to a community’s identity and heritage.

Going to a Rosenwald school initially meant being in the vanguard of education for African American children. The architecture of the schools made a visual assertion of the equality of all children, and the activities at the school made it a focal point of community identity and aspirations. Yet as Rosenwald schools’ modern design principles became commonplace, and public school authorities retreated back to the neglect from which the promise of grant money had lured them, Rosenwald schools temporarily lost some of their luster. In the late twentieth century, grassroots activists began new campaigns for Rosenwald schools, joining forces with preservationists, educators, and historians. While many Rosenwald schools had fallen victim to changing school practices, neglect, and the elements, many others have been cherished by their alumni and community members. Alumni have erected monuments at the sites of surviving and lost Rosenwald schools. The buildings still serve as schools, preschools, community centers, and social service offices. In some cases they have reverted back to the churches that first sponsored them. Some have new lives as private homes and apartments. Rosenwald schools remain an integral part of community life across the South.