By Patricia Staino
- Introduction
- The State of Education in the Early 20th Century
- Preserving the Legacy of Rosenwald Schools
- A Chapter Closes; the Foundation Laid
- North Carolina Rosenwald Schools on the National Register Study List
- North Carolina Rosenwald Schools Listed In The National Register Of Historic Places
- To Help with the Project
- Download the article
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North Carolina was home to more Rosenwald schools than any other state in the country. Built between 1917 and 1932, these small, wooden structures are located in the state’s rural counties, and once served as the center of rural black community life. Now an effort is under way to find, identify and record the locations of these schools before the structures disappear altogether. But even if the buildings are gone, the legacy of the Rosenwald schools is a cornerstone in the foundation of North Carolina’s public education system.
The schools
are named for Julius Rosenwald, who at the time
of the program’s inception was the president of Sears, Roebuck
and Company. Rosenwald had become friendly with black educator Booker
T. Washington and began making charitable donations to the black secondary
schools and colleges that Washington’s Tuskegee Institute was helping
to establish. Washington asked if a small portion of one $25,000 gift
could be used for elementary school programs and Rosenwald agreed, with
one stipulation; rather than give the money to black communities, he
wanted to match funds that the people had raised themselves to fund the
schools. A couple of years later, he set up the Rosenwald Fund to continue
this work on a larger scale.
All but seven of the state’s counties had at least one Rosenwald school, although most are concentrated in the piedmont and coastal plain.
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