A good tale attracts many tellers. That's true for the story of the Rosenwald school building program, the matching-grant initiative that helped construct nearly five thousand educational buildings in rural Black communities across the South during the 1910s-1930s. Andrew Feiler's new volume is a welcome addition to this growing bookshelf.
Over the past two decades, scholars, historic preservation activists, and grassroots community members have rediscovered the partnership that Black educator Booker T. Washington crafted with Julius Rosenwald, the White Jewish man who turned a local Chicago store into Sears, Roebuck, the nation's first coast-to-coast retailer. Tennessee historian Mary Hoffschwelle's The Rosenwald Schools of the American South in 2006 was the first book-length study since the Rosenwald Fund ceased its work before World War II. In 2011 Stephanie Deutsch added You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South. Norman H. Finkelstein's Schools of Hope: How Julius Rosenwald Helped Change African American Education (2014) retold the story for students of middle school age. Peter Ascoli, a Rosenwald descendant and an accomplished scholar of Jewish history, contributed the biography Julius Rosenwald, The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South (2006). My website, http://www.historysouth.org/RosenwaldHome, reproduced the program's carefully thought-out architectural plans. There's also a documentary film available, written and directed by Aviva Kempner: Rosenwald: A Remarkable Story of a Jewish Partnership with African American Communities. Many additional scholars have considered Rosenwald's effect on aspects of society including James Leloudis in Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 and Aisha M. Johnson-Jones in The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program.
With all those resources available, do we need yet another book? Yes, we do. Andrew Feiler's perspective adds two valuable dimensions to the Rosenwald story.
The first is visual. Feiler drove some twenty-five thousand miles during a three-year period to photograph 105 schools in all fifteen of the Southern states where the Rosenwald Fund was active (he estimates that about five hundred buildings survive, all told). The compelling images, printed large at 5.25 x 8 inches, introduce us to the range of building types. One-teacher structures, where a single instructor handled as many as five grades, gave way over the years to larger facilities with separate rooms for grades one through twelve. A unifying characteristic were banks of tall windows, precisely situated to catch available natural light in an era when electricity had reached little of rural America. Feiler's initial architectural interest deepened over the course of the project: “As I visited more schools, I ventured inside them and marveled at how they are being used today . . . [as] community centers, church halls, daycare centers, offices, apartments”—though some were “piles of rubble so recent they were surrounded by emergency fencing or yellow caution tape.”
Feiler's growing connections led to the most valuable dimension of this work: the people's stories he conveys in concise and gracefully written text. We meet families today who bring fresh life to buildings their great-grandparents helped construct decades ago. There are Black professionals who come back to Southern hometowns, taking on a school and local youth as a retirement project. At Walnut Cove in North Carolina, Feiler's camera catches an interracial group doing yoga in what is now the town's senior citizen center. In Cass County, Texas, a quilters’ club gathers under the big windows, using their craft for education and fundraising. We meet Major L. Anderson, one of World War II's Tuskegee Airmen, and we hear from the daughter of esteemed photographer Gordon Parks about the Rosenwald Fund's shift to fellowships for cultural changemakers. In a moving forward to the book, the late US congressman and voting rights activist John Lewis remembers his formative days in a Rosenwald school.
A century ago, Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald came together to create a program designed, in turn, to bring many more people together. Rosenwald's cash was matched by local grassroots contributions, with Black farm families rallying together to raise nickels and dimes—usually kicking in more cash than Rosenwald did. Then the White-dominated school board had to agree to operate the school. That three-way match meant that each building had many stakeholders. Better than any previous teller of the Rosenwald school story, Andrew Feiler conveys not just how the schools were built, but also the love and hard work whereby the surviving structures endured over the generations.
