The Rosenwald Schools

In nineteen twelve, Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to create a fund that would help Black communities across the South build better schools. The arrangement was simple: the fund would provide matching grants, but local communities had to raise part of the money themselves, a condition designed to build ownership and lasting investment.

In North Carolina alone, the Rosenwald Fund assisted with eight hundred seventeen projects in ninety-three of the state's one hundred counties. The first in North Carolina was Warren Grove School, completed in October of nineteen fifteen. Statewide, the schools became anchors of Black education during the Jim Crow era, producing generations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and civil rights leaders. The first Rosenwald school in the nation was built in Macon County, Alabama in nineteen thirteen. By the time the fund closed in nineteen forty-eight, more than five thousand schools had been built across fifteen southern states.