Students outside a Rosenwald school (Photo taken in 1939)
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
Making sure everyone gets a chance for an education and an opportunity for employment is the recently-reviled concept of DEI. Afraid of political repercussions, retailers like Target and Walmart have run away from explicitly welcoming diverse customers and employees in their ranks.
But DEI is not a new concept. By 1912, Julius Rosenwald had risen to become president of Sears and turned it into the world’s largest retailer. And he didn’t do it by telling one community or another they weren’t welcome.
In 1911, Rosenwald met Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery and who, by 1881, had founded the Tuskegee Institute to train Black teachers. Washington convinced Rosenwald to serve on Tuskegee’s board of directors.
Rosenwald had been concerned about the lack of schools for Black children, especially across the South. He was disturbed by the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined Jim Crow laws and created the concept of separate but equal. He thought unequal education was the greatest social problem in the country at the time.
This collaboration between a Jewish man and a former slave who understand that separate would never be equal and were determined to do something about it resulted in almost 5,000 schools being built over the next 20 years in 15 states. That included 464 schools built in Texas, mostly across the rural eastern part of the state.
A new exhibit at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, called A Better Life for Their Children, explores the effect that these schools had on the Black population across the South.
Of the original 4,978 schools built, about 500 survive today. Some are abandoned buildings; others have been repurposed as community centers or historical sites, and a few remain as active schools.
Savannah photographer Andrew Feiler photographed 105 of the surviving schools (and one that had just been torn down a week before he got there), and he interviewed former teachers, students and community leaders across the 15 states with Rosenwald schools, as they came to be known.
A number of his photos of individual schools are on display at the Dallas Holocaust Museum with statements about the impact that the schools made on the community.
Among those who were educated at one of the Rosenwald schools were writer Maya Angelou and civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963 for his work. Congressman John Lewis was also a Rosenwald school graduate.
Feiler said he contacted Lewis about writing a piece about his school for the book of photographs of the surviving schools he was putting together. At first, Lewis demurred, telling Feiler there were better historians than him to tell the story. But Feiler said he wasn’t looking for him to tell the school’s history; he wanted Lewis to explain what the school meant to him.
That Lewis was able to do, and the late congressman credited the education he got at a Rosenwald school with everything he achieved in his life.
Economists have studied the effects of the Rosenwald schools and at least five studies have shown that, prior to World War I, “there was a significant, persistent gap in education attainment between Black and white people in the South,” according to information available in the exhibit.
In the period between the world wars, the gap narrowed significantly. The studies concluded that the largest single factor driving that change were the Rosenwald schools. The gains were highest in the most disadvantaged counties.
Other effects included improved school attendance, literacy and test scores. Wages for Black people who stayed in the South increased but also increased the chances graduates would move to other parts of the country where employment opportunities were better. And children with Rosenwald school parents were more likely to complete their education as well.
To make sure the area was invested in the success of the school and to promote collaboration between white and Black people, Rosenwald encouraged the community to contribute to the cost of building the schools. That contribution came in the form of donating the land, the labor, materials or sometimes cash.
Rosenwald remained on the board of Tuskegee until his death in 1932.
Upon his death, he left $70 million (almost $1 billion in today’s dollars) to public schools, colleges, including Tuskegee and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (which he said he didn’t want named after himself), Jewish charities and Black institutions. It took until 1948 to distribute the money from his estate.
In an era when diversity has become a dirty word, learning about Rosenwald’s concern for people who didn’t look like him was refreshing.
A Better Life for their Children remains on exhibit at the DHHRM, 300 N. Houston St., through Aug, 17. The museum is open 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday and is closed on Tuesday.