The Rosenwald rural school building program was a major effort to improve the quality of public education for African Americans in the early twentieth-century South. In 1912, Julius Rosenwald gave Booker T. Washington permission to use some of the money he had donated to Tuskegee Institute for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914. Pleased with the results, Rosenwald then agreed to fund a larger program for schoolhouse construction based at Tuskegee. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago-based philanthropic foundation, and in 1920 the Rosenwald Fund established an independent office for the school building program in Nashville, Tennessee. By 1928, one in every five rural schools for black students in the South was a Rosenwald school, and these schools housed one third of the region's rural black schoolchildren and teachers. At the program's conclusion in 1932, it had produced 4,977 new schools, 217 teachers' homes, and 163 shop buildings, constructed at a total cost of $28,408,520 to serve 663,615 students in 883 counties of 15 states.

ORIGINS AT TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE
The Rosenwald school story begins with Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now Tuskegee University. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Washington preached a gospel of self-help for black southerners that emphasized economic advancement through vocational education without challenging racial segregation and the disfranchisement of black voters. Critics such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for a direct challenge to segregation. But Washington attracted support from black and white Americans who agreed that economic and education needs should be addressed first in a long term drive for equality, and feared that a more confrontational approach would only unleash a white backlash.

One of Washington’s many goals for rural southern African Americans was to provide black children with safe, purpose-built school buildings. At this time, most public rural black schools were dilapidated structures with few amenities other than makeshift desks and benches. Many counties provided few or no public school buildings for African Americans, and so children learned in churches, lodge halls, and other private buildings. Washington’s plan was to organize black school patrons to buy land and build schools that would then be turned over to local authorities. These schools would feature a Tuskegee-style “industrial” (vocational) curriculum combining basic literacy and numeracy skills with agricultural and trades programs for boys and home economics study for girls. Rural African American southerners could not afford to tackle these projects without some kind of financial support, and rather than demanding a just share of public school funds, Washington turned to the white philanthropists who supported Tuskegee Institute.

Washington approached Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, in 1912. Rosenwald had already shown interest in supporting building programs by offering matching grants for the construction of Y.M.C.A. buildings. He had recently joined the Tuskegee Institute’s board of trustees, and would remain a loyal supporter of the institution until his death in 1932. Like other northern philanthropists active in southern education in the early twentieth century, Rosenwald was fascinated by Booker T. Washington. He agreed whole-heartedly with Washington’s philosophy of black self-help, as well as the Tuskegee Institute's industrial program.

On his fiftieth birthday in 1912, Rosenwald had celebrated by distributing monetary gifts to a number of causes, including $25,000 for Tuskegee Institute. This donation funded matching grants to African American teacher-training institutions that followed the Tuskegee model. Finding $2,800 left over after the initial distribution of grants, Washington revived his rural public school scheme. In September 1912, he asked Rosenwald's permission to use the remainder for an experiment in building rural public schools in Alabama. The six original Rosenwald schools included Notasulga and Brownsville in Macon County, Loachapoka and Chewacla in Lee County, and Big Zion and Madison Park in Montgomery County. Each received about $300 towards construction costs in the original Rosenwald gift, which allowed schoolchildren and teachers to move out of the churches and lodge halls that had previously housed them. Rosenwald's next step was a $30,000 gift in 1914 for construction of one hundred rural schools, followed by gifts for up to two hundred additional schools in 1916, each of which could obtain a maximum individual grant of $300.

In 1917, Rosenwald placed his building project under the auspices of a new philanthropic foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald believed that philanthropies like his own Rosenwald Fund should use their grants as seed money to encourage individuals and governments to take responsibility for needed programs and services. He and Rosenwald Fund staff saw the building program as an incentive to southern states to meet their responsibility for decent public schools for black children. Rosenwald’s philosophy of philanthropy also led him to disapprove of perpetual trusts because he did not think that they could respond properly to the unknown needs of the future. Thus he directed the Rosenwald Fund’s officers to expend its assets to meet its goals in their present time.

A small staff based in Chicago, headed up first by Francis W. Shepardson and then Alfred K. Stern, directed the Rosenwald Fund’s early operations. At Tuskegee, a committee of Tuskegee executive officers that included Margaret Murray (Mrs. Booker T.) Washington oversaw the construction program. Clinton J. Calloway, the director of Tuskegee’s Division of Extension, coordinated the applications and grants for the individual schools. He worked closely with the state agents for Negro schools, officials of southern state departments of education who were responsible for black public education. Calloway also monitored the reports of the Rosenwald building agents who constantly toured their states, drumming up support among black school patrons and white school officials, and monitoring fundraising and construction efforts. Ten of the fifteen states that participated in the building program also employed Rosenwald building agents for some period of time between 1915 and 1932, with half of their salaries paid by the Rosenwald Fund.

REORGANIZATION OF THE BUILDING PROGRAM
By 1919, the Rosenwald building program had overwhelmed its administrators at Tuskegee, and the Rosenwald Fund undertook a review of the program’s operation. Fletcher B. Dresslar of the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, offered a harsh critique of the buildings. At the same time, an audit of the Rosenwald program’s financial records at Tuskegee revealed mistakes caused by lack of oversight and the crush of work pressing on a few staff members. Furthermore, some white state and county officials complained about having to participate in a program run by black administrators.

The Rosenwald Fund responded by removing the building program from Tuskegee. Samuel L. Smith, formerly Tennessee’s Negro school agent, became the director of an independent Rosenwald Fund Southern Office in Nashville in 1920. Now the goal was to construct model rural schools. The Fund required that schools it aided meet specific minimum standards for the site size and length of school term, and have new blackboards and desks for each classroom, as well as two sanitary privies. School grants were based on the number of teachers employed, ranging from $500 for a one-teacher building to a maximum $2,100 for a school for ten or more teachers. The Fund also offered grants of $200 per classroom for additions to existing Rosenwald schools from 1921 to 1931.

African Americans had to contribute cash and in-kind donations of material labor to match the Rosenwald grant. Although the Rosenwald Fund emphasized that its schools received additional contributions from “white friends,” overall the personal contributions by white southerners constituted the smallest category of support for Rosenwald schools. By far the largest source of funding was tax funds. The county school board had to provide public support, take ownership of the new school property, and commit to maintaining it as part of the public school system. In the prime years of the school building program from 1920 to 1928, between four and five hundred schools were built annually, with the fund's aid totaling from $356,000 to $414,000 each year.

EXPANDING GRANT OPPORTUNITIES
Although construction grants remained the heart of the Rosenwald school program, the Rosenwald Fund added other school-related grant opportunities that would improve instruction as well. For example, the Fund’s insistence on a minimum school term as a requirement for construction grants led it to provide matching grants for term extension to county boards of education so that more black students would enjoy a full scholastic year and black teachers could earn a decent annual salary.

Recognizing that county boards of education did not pay for adequate classroom materials, the Rosenwald Fund also subsidized low-cost school libraries, offering sets of carefully chosen works that included positive accounts of African American history and culture. First offered to selected Rosenwald schools in 1927, Rosenwald libraries were later made available to any African American school and rural white schools as well. Rosenwald radios, made available at special rates beginning in 1929, brought the news and culture of the nation into rural black schools and provided a source of information and entertainment that could be shared with community members. Starting in 1929 the Rosenwald Fund offered to pay for buses to transport students to consolidated schools as an incentive for school boards to extend this service permanently. School and community pride were the goals of Rosenwald School Days, which began in 1927 and were celebrated annually well into the 1930s. Teachers, principals, students, and parents would gather at their schools on a designated day to clean, repair, and paint the buildings, improve the grounds, and contribute money for other projects, as well as enjoy a program of songs and speeches.

The rural school building program’s diversified programs matched Julius Rosenwald’s and his foundation’s growing interest in developing a more comprehensive approach to the problems faced by African Americans. In 1928, Rosenwald embarked on a major reorganization of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Edwin R. Embree, formerly of the Rockefeller Foundation, became president under an expanded board of trustees. Embree began scaling back the school building program and shifting the Fund into a broad array of projects in rural and higher education, medicine, and race relations.

Simultaneously, the Rosenwald Fund attempted to reinvigorate the concept of industrial education. Alfred Stern and Edwin Embree hoped to encourage the construction of urban industrial high schools that would offer modern trades education to train black youth in the lines of work already identified with African American laborers. Fund officials commissioned studies of industrial conditions in cities that were interested in participating in the program, most of which were completed by Mabel Byrd of Fisk University under the direction of sociologist Charles S. Johnson, head of Fisk’s social science department. Cleveland school architect Walter J. McCornack assisted city school boards with the building plans. Only five urban industrial high schools were constructed, in Little Rock, Arkansas; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Maysville, Kentucky; Greenville, South Carolina; and Columbus, Georgia. Most of the cities that applied for this aid eventually opted for a smaller grant toward an industrial department within a regular high school setting rather than building costly trades schools that would not expand their students’ job opportunities. This unsuccessful experiment, for which the Fund expended almost $203,000, stopped accepting applications in 1930.

After Julius Rosenwald's death in 1932, Edwin Embree announced that the school building program would end with that year. One last Rosenwald school was constructed in 1937 in Warm Springs, Georgia, at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Southern Office closed at the end of 1937 with the retirement of Samuel L. Smith. Eleven years later, the Julius Rosenwald Fund distributed its last grants and went out of existence, just as its founder had intended.

ROSENWALD SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, AND COMMUNITIES
The first Rosenwald schools opened in 1913 and 1914. Many of the Rosenwald schools constructed between 1913 and 1932 remained in operation until the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was implemented during the 1960s and school integration in the 1970s. During that time, Rosenwald schools served generations of teachers, students, parents, and other community members.

Grassroots support was the critical ingredient for the success of the Rosenwald school building program. A shared faith in the power of self-help led Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald to insist on local contributions to match the amount of a Rosenwald grant, rather than insisting on full public or philanthropic funding. They believed that personal sacrifices of hard-earned cash, lumber, and labor would strengthen rural African Americans' commitment to their communities. In practice, the self-help requirement made rural African Americans the driving force behind the Rosenwald program and the arbiters of its meaning for southern communities.

Local African American leaders—teachers, principals, school trustees, ministers, and successful farm or business owners—often initiated building campaigns. They wrote to state education departments, Tuskegee Institute, and the Rosenwald Fund for information, lobbied county superintendents and school boards for additional funding, and recruited their fellow citizens’ support. To make their matching contribution, school patrons organized themselves into committees to find and buy the land, to cut trees and saw the lumber for the school, and to haul the building materials to the school site, sometimes even to build the school themselves. Those who pledged contributions of money and labor included rural wage earners such as sawmill and domestic workers, farm owners and tenants, and the members of church congregations and fraternal lodges. Some donated a day’s pay or the proceeds of an acre of cotton; others sold chickens. School rallies, community picnics, and entertainments brought in cash as well. The result was a school building that stood as a tangible expression of a community’s determination to provide a decent education for its children.

Another aspect of the Rosenwald program that has attracted attention since the first Tuskegee buildings is the provision for industrial education. Some black and many white educational reformers and philanthropists embraced industrial education as a “safe” strategy for improving public education for black children. Industrial education would assure white southerners that the existing racial hierarchy would remain intact, but with a more contented and better skilled black work force. For others, it was simply a strategy for buying white support that they planned to use to secure better academic programs for black schools. Once again, the Rosenwald Fund found that local people would determine how its programs would be implemented. State agents for Negro schools and Rosenwald building agents constantly complained of finding industrial education rooms functioning as regular classrooms.

Rosenwald students in later life recalled plenty of work, discipline, and community-oriented activities. Boys often began fall and winter school days pumping water and building fires. Girls and boys helped the teacher to clean the school and maintain the grounds. Recollections about teachers and classroom activities emphasize strict standards of personal deportment and attention to their studies, as well as the fun children had sharing lunches and playing sports. The school also functioned as a gathering place for the community. In smaller schools, people pushed aside the movable partitions between classrooms or raised up blackboards to create openings between the rooms so that they could gather together. Larger schools had auditoriums and gymnasiums for school use and public events. In addition to school plays, competitive sporting events, student socials, and graduation ceremonies, Rosenwald schools also opened their doors to the community for speeches, public meetings, and entertainments such as magic shows, movies, and dramatic performances. Former Rosenwald students described the work ethic, discipline, and community values that parents and teachers instilled in them as positive life lessons, but they resented that white authorities continued to pay little attention to black children’s needs, sending them cast-off textbooks and equipment from the white schools and offering few or no secondary grades.

Although the Rosenwald program did not challenge school segregation head-on, it did challenge the racial ideology behind segregation. Progressive educators and school architects recognized Rosenwald schools as part of their campaign for modern standardized school plans. The modest, cost-conscious designs with their industrial rooms identified them as rural schools for black children, but these features also made them useful to states that were rapidly expanding their public school infrastructure and vocational education programs for all students. Professional educators and cost-conscious school administrators borrowed freely from Rosenwald plans in developing their own state-approved school designs. They used these plans to build black schools that did not receive Rosenwald grants, and to build schools for white children as well. Consequently, although educated separately, many southern white and black children learned in classrooms that looked and felt the same—open, bright, orderly, clean—thanks to Rosenwald designs.