The Rosenwald School program, forged by Black educator Booker T. Washington and Jewish businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, is one of the most transformative educational initiatives in American history. The schools countered, but often did not erase, the deep educational disparities during Jim Crow.

However, Rosenwald schools did produce several notable graduates and fellows, including Maya Angelou, Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Lewis.

To help memorialize this great movement, historically Black Fisk University has launched a new database. Additionally, Vyllorya Evans and Marvin Tupper Jones, subscribers to the Port of Harlem magazine, are actively involved in preservation initiatives for the Rosenwald Schools in North Carolina and Mississippi.
Washington and Rosenwald initiated the building of thousands of schools for Black students in 15 states after meeting in 1912.

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The Fisk database includes 146,000 digitized materials from the schools.

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Rosenwald provided the seed money; however, he required communities to participate. With the program, African American rural communities raised millions of dollars and contributed to the construction of the buildings, while White school boards operated and maintained the schools.

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and subsequent desegregation, most Rosenwald schools closed. The Fisk database includes 146,000 digitized materials from the schools, including plans for Rosenwald School buildings, photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, playbills, fellowship applications, and more.

While there were schools for Blacks before the Rosenwald schools opened, they were often built by underfunded Black churches and civic organizations. The 4,978 better-funded Rosenwald schools changed America and the lives of Washington, D.C.-based Evans and Jones.

For Evans, whose parents taught at Rosenwald Schools, the schools were such a part of her life that she says, “It’s hard to say how they changed my life because I didn’t know until I was 40 years old the historic nature of the schools.” However, in hindsight, she remembers her parents working hard to maintain the schools, including her father doing carpentry work at one of the schools after he had stopped teaching to take another job, and her mother preparing classroom bulletin boards.

As co-chair of the Rosenwald School Initiative of Monroe County, Evans helped unveil the Higgason Rosenwald School Historical Marker at Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church, where teachers educated African American students from 1927 through 1960. It was one of 557 such schools built across Mississippi. In the near future, they plan to place historical markers at the former school sites of Amory’s Monroe County School, Jarmon, Sandy Clay, Smithville Colored School, Watkins, and Young Cross Roads.

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Fisk, Evans, and Jones are still building on the Washington and Rosenwald, Black and Jewish collaboration.

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“I went to CS Brown for the first nine years, and four of those years in a Rosenwald building,” recalls Jones. The Brown building includes a Greek Revival front and an auditorium. The school and building showed me that I was in a “progressive, developing, community, and this despite Jim Crow,” he added.

Jones heads Chowan Discovery, which researches, documents, preserves, and presents the history of the Winton (North Carolina) Triangle. Chowery Discovery placed a marker at the Pleasant Plains Rosenwald school. At C.S. Brown Auditorium, they replaced two of the four Tuscan-style columns. Pleasant Plains is now a community center, and the Auditorium now serves as the C.S. Brown Regional Cultural Arts Center and Museum.

Fisk, Evans, and Jones are still building on the Washington and Rosenwald, Black and Jewish collaboration. “It is now up to local communities to find use for these buildings, to raise funds, to create programs, and to get young people involved,” added Tupper-Jones.

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Rosenwald Database at Fisk University