Schools That Changed Our Region

Rosenwald

How did a wealthy businessman from Chicago become so involved in educating school children in the South almost a century ago?

Increasingly lost in our collective memory is how Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, teamed up with Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and an African-American leader and philanthropist, to create school after school throughout our region in the early twentieth century.

Washington was known for saying, “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” Rosenwald did exactly that.

Rosenwald and Washington in 1915. Photo: University of Chicago Library.

In the segregated school systems of the Jim Crow era, the education of African-American students was woefully inadequate and underfunded. To offset this deficiency, Rosenwald established a fund that provided “seed money” to build almost 5,000 schools for African-Americans in 15 states—those that had joined the Confederacy and several bordering states. More buildings were constructed in North Carolina than any other state—813 were erected here.

Schools built in the Sandhills area of the state tell part of the story:

• Moore County’s surviving Rosenwald-funded school is in Pinebluff. Known as the Lincoln Park School, the one-story, four-teacher building that served Addor and nearby African-American communities. Built in 1922, it still stands at 1272 S. Currant St. Placed on the National Register in 1997, it hasn’t been used as a school for 70 years. In Moore County, a total of 15 Rosenwald schools (serving 50 teachers) were built during 1920-1929. 

Lincoln Park School.

• In Harnett County, 23 Rosenwald schools were built (during 1922-1930 for 73 teachers). Still surviving is a complex of six buildings known as Harnett County Training School that began as a two-story, 14-teacher structure built in 1922. When it opened in Dunn at 610 E. Johnston St., it served first through 11th graders and was the only brick multi-story school for African-Americans in the county. It became one of the largest Rosenwald schools in the state when it was expanded in 1927. Placed on the National Register in 2014, it is one of only three multi-story Rosenwald schools in the state still standing. 

Harnett County Training School.

• In Richmond County, 65 teachers taught in 21 Rosenwald schools, ranging from one- to 10-teacher structures, built during 1918-1930. As many as 17 are no longer identifiable or known to the Richmond County Historical Association; knowledge of them has vanished along with the structures. Still physically surviving is Liberty Hill School at 234 Covington Community Road northwest of Ellerbe that was placed on the National Register in 2008. The building has two classrooms as well as an industrial room where girls learned home economics and boys were trained to use farming tools. The one-story, two-teacher building—built in 1930 when construction of Rosenwald schools was ending in this area—was no longer used as a school by the mid-1950s. 

Liberty Hill School.

In addition to building schools, Rosenwald wanted to promote collaboration among white and black citizens. He required local communities to raise matching funds and white-controlled school boards to operate and maintain the schools.

Interior space of Liberty Hill School.

When the school-building program ended in 1932, the Rosenwald Fund had contributed $4.3 million to improve African-American education in the South. Raising money to match Rosenwald’s donations was not easy for cotton and tobacco tenant farmers in rural communities. The grassroots-fundraising literally collected a penny and a nickel at a time; however, eventually African-Americans in the South contributed $4.7 million. In North Carolina, they contributed more than $666,000 to the program.

The schools were designed very carefully because they originally had no electricity. To maximize natural light, their plans included detailed suggestions for window placement, blackboard location and desk orientation. By 1929, Rosenwald schools served one-third of the South’s rural African-American students and teachers.

Many schools were demolished after the Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that school segregation is unconstitutional. In most areas, these buildings have long decayed, been abandoned and lost in time with little trace of their existence. However, in a few communities, the old schools have found new lives as senior citizen housing, a town hall, community centers, and offices. Others have been preserved by being placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As late as 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a campaign to raise awareness and money for protecting Rosenwald schools and named them as being near the top of America’s most endangered places.

The Rosenwald school-building program helped many African-Americans gain an education that otherwise would not have been available. These relics of a painful past are part of American history and very prominent elements of our regional culture. Unfortunately, they continue to decline and become more endangered with each passing year.

Rosenwald once said, “All the other pleasures of life seem to wear out, but the pleasure of helping others in distress never does.” How he helped others will continue to inspire us well into the future.

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Note: The post is based on my article about Rosenwald schools published in the September 2019 issue of OutreachNC Magazine.