By Hannah Miller, June 2011
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Getting an education required determination — and a strong constitution — when Betty Thompson attended Canetuck School in the 1940s and ‘50s. At 6 years old, she walked with other rural students 6½ miles through the Pender County woods. “Some of the mornings were so cold,” she remembers.
“We would build a fire on the side of the road to stay warm,” fellow student Dixie Corbett says.
When they got to the school, there were no bathrooms; the students used the privies in the yard. There was no electricity in the building. Students read by light from the many windows. (Today, the building is lighted by Four County EMC.)
As tough as conditions were, Thompson, Corbett and other students still have a warm spot in their hearts for the white-frame building tucked among Spanish-moss-draped pines.
They are like many other African Americans who attended the Rosenwald schools built for rural black children in the segregated era of 1917–1932.
“We had some No. 1 good teachers there,” says Eunice Jones Williams, who started at Castalia Rosenwald School in Nash County in 1927, not long after it was built. She later went on to Columbia University and a 40-year teaching career. “They were the kind that made sure you did what you could. You didn’t play around.”
An alliance formed by Sears-Roebuck executive Julius Rosenwald and local African-American communities built more than 5,300 of these schools across the South. The families, most of whom were sharecroppers, sold chickens and eggs, held community suppers, cut timber and otherwise stretched their pennies to raise money.
At Canetuck, families raised $1,226 to Rosenwald’s $800. Another $674 came from public funds. In all, black families across the South raised $4.7 million to Rosenwald’s $4.3 million.
“They wanted a better life for us,” says Thompson, who went on to advanced study at Columbia University and a career in educational administration in New Jersey.
“I’m very thankful, because I’m a product of that,” says former Warren County Training School student Thomas A. Harris of Littleton, a retired longshoreman. “I learned well. I went out in the world and was able to compete with just about anybody.”
During school consolidation and integration of the 1950s and ’60s, the schools closed. In recent years, a recognition of what they have meant not only to African Americans but to America as a whole is prompting a groundswell of restoration efforts.
Their establishment was “a major change in the history of America,” believes JoAnn Stevens, president of the Rosenwald Center for Cultural Enrichment in Snow Hill. Without them and the educational opportunity they offered African-American youth, America would have been a much different nation, she says.
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