Exhibit delves into the history of the Rosenwald Schools of Texas

“Money may be the root of all evil in one sense, but it is also the root of all the universities, colleges, churches and libraries scattered through the land.” – Andrew Carnegie (1906)

Two weeks ago, the Bullock Texas State History Museum unveiled a temporary exhibition about Black education in the early 20th Century.

“We’ve been planning this for months,” said curator James McReynolds. “It’s a culmination of a lot of hard work.

“A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America” features twenty three black and white photos documenting some of the early schools Black students attended in the American South in the decades after slavery was abolished.

“They did not have running water or electricity,” explained McReynolds. “So these schools needed stoves to keep the buildings warm in the winter to cook food on.”

Public education didn’t exist in the South before the Civil War. 

The development of school systems was part of the Reconstruction process. But because of racist policies by state legislatures, large funding disparities developed between the segregated white and Black school systems.

“The Freedmen’s Bureau, organized by the federal government, founded several schools in the state that offered classes to African Americans,” wrote the Texas Historical Commission. “But Texas’ segregated public education system continued to underfund African American scholastic activities.”

To address this inequity, northern philanthropists with a soft spot for the plight of Black Americans used their wealth to influence Southern politics and subsidize Black education.

The new Bullock exhibition highlights the efforts of perhaps the most influential of these wealthy donors, a man named Julius Rosenwald.

“Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, which was the largest company in the world at the time,” explained McReynolds. “He heavily believed in the importance of education.”

To transform his fortune into social progress, Rosenwald worked with the most influential Black American of his day.

“He partnered with Booker T. Washington,” said McReynolds. “They wanted to tackle this racial education gap.”

Born into slavery, Washington was head of the The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, the largest and most important Black institution at the turn of the 20th Century.

From 1912 to 1932, Rosenwald used his personal fortune and Washington’s knowledge of Black education to sponsor the construction of around 5,000 schools, mostly in the rural South. 

When funds were made available for Texas in 1920, local governments and communities took advantage. Of the fifteen states where Rosenwald-subsidized buildings were constructed, only two received more buildings than the Lone Star State.

“The Rosenwald Fund supported the construction of nearly 500 schools in the state of Texas,” said McReynolds. “And it also supported the construction of teacher’s homes and industrial shops in 82 different counties.”

At one point, around 5,000 Rosenwald schools were scattered throughout the American South. But after integration, the majority of these early educational institutions were abandoned and have since fallen into disrepair.

In addition to photos, the exhibition at the Bullock also features artifacts from three former Rosenwald schools around Texas.

“The first artifacts you’re going to see when you come into the gallery are from the Hopewell School in Bastrop County,” said McReynolds. “We have a student desk. We have a potbelly stove and we have a portrait of some of the relatives that donated the land for the construction of the school.”

On the exhibition’s back wall, there’s a large map of where Rosenwald schools were located in Texas. 

Overwhelmingly, these early Black schools were constructed in East and Northeast Texas, where the majority of enslaved people lived before Emancipation.

“In 1993, the Texas Historical Commission began a survey of all Rosenwald-funded buildings in the state,” part of the caption reads. “The locations of most school buildings are still unknown and many no longer exist.”

Rosenwald schools once served as focal points for rural Black communities, but in the almost century since the program disbanded, public knowledge of its influence has dwindled.

The photographs and artifacts on display at the Bullock aim to address this.

“That part of history kind of fell to the wayside,” said McReynolds, “so hopefully this exhibition can help bring that to people’s attention.”

“A Better Life for Their Children” runs through February 2025. Admission is $9 for children, $15 for adults, and $11 for students, military, and seniors.

The Modern Moses and the robber barons

In 1901, Booker T. Washington published an American classic. 

“I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia,” his autobiography “Up From Slavery” begins. “My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.”

Released at the zenith of his influence, Washington used “Up From Slavery” to relay a narrative account of his life, one in which he’s the protagonist during a watershed moment in history.

“My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks,” he wrote about hearing the Emancipation Proclamation read to his family. 

Emancipation was a turning point in America, but it also set the stage for a new problem that historian Carl Moneyhon describes in his book “Texas After the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction.”

“African Americans were no longer slaves,” Moneyhon wrote. “But they found themselves constrained by a new bondage of poverty and racism that seriously limited the freedom they might have enjoyed.”

All across the South, Black Americans were liberated, but still largely relegated to manual labor with little opportunity for advancement. Education was seen as a way out.

“My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.” 

“Up From Slavery” offers a firsthand account of how freed communities responded as the first Black schools began opening during Reconstruction.

“Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn,” Washington wrote when a school opened in his rural West Virginia community during the mid-1860s. “The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died.”

When the book was released at the turn of the 20th Century, Washington was principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which at the time had around a thousand Black students and a hundred faculty members in Macon County, Ala.

“Up From Slavery” served as proof of the American Dream. In it, Washington espouses the values of personal responsibility, self-help, and industrial education.

“No student, no matter how much money he may be able to command, is permitted to go through school without doing manual labour,” he wrote about Tuskegee’s curriculum.

Washington believed that to advance economically and socially, Black Americans should focus on acquiring tangible skills like carpentry, brickmaking, masonry, engineering, and homemaking.

“I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for,” Washington argued, “is the opportunity of making someone else more happy and more useful.”

Washington’s vision of Black advancement, which centered around the trades and manual labor, can be considered accommodationist and even accepting of structural racism. But it was also pragmatic.

“Tuskegee taught self-determination,” wrote historian Louis Harlan in a 1982 essay. “It also taught trades designed for economic independence in a region dominated by sharecrop agriculture.”

When the Alabama Legislature established Tuskegee in 1881, it allocated $2,000 in funding that could only be used to pay teacher’s salaries. 

Where the school went, how to fund it, and other questions about operations were left to the staff of Tuskegee. This meant that in order to build a Black institution and spread his ideas, Washington needed money.

This is one of the reasons why in telling his life story, Washington extended an olive branch to white America. 

“I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race,” Washington wrote. “No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction.”

This strategy earned him both critics and influence.

“Washington has been the schoolbook Black hero for more than half a century,” Harlan wrote in 1972. “The white authors of the American national myth have made him the token Negro in the company of the white heroes.”

Harlan spent two decades researching and writing two biographies of Washington’s career, where he documented in detail how he constructed what is referred to by historians as the Tuskegee Machine.

Beginning in the late-1890s, Booker T. Washington began constructing a nationwide network of journalists, educators, politicians, bureaucrats, and philanthropists who served his interests and gave him access to resources. His moral authority was lucrative.

“The swollen fortunes of American industrialization,” wrote Harlan, “were ready to be disgorged.”

Through his machine, Washington came into contact with many wealthy people who subsidized Tuskegee’s operations and expanded his influence.

J.P Morgan, Henry Rogers, George Peabody, and John D. Rockefeller all made sizable donations that powered the Tuskegee Machine.

Andrew Carnegie, who once gave $600,000 to Washington’s cause, once called him, “the modern Moses, who leads his race and lifts it through education to even better and higher things than a land overflowing with milk and honey.”

Washington used this money to promote his message, subsidize Black education, fund civil rights battles, and silence critics who argued that he was too accommodating to white supremacy.

“Ideas he cared little for,” Harlan wrote. “Power was his game.”

On the school’s 25th anniversary, the Tuskegee Institute sat on a 2,000-acre campus, had an endowment of $1.2 million, and enrolled more than 1,500 students. 

Positioned at the helm of his machine, Booker T. Washington had the ear of philanthropists, governors, and presidents, but few of these connections would impact American history as profoundly as his relationship with Julius Rosenwald.

“Of all the philanthropists of his time,” wrote Louis Harlan, “Rosenwald was the most accessible to Black people and the most easily touched in heart and pocketbook.”

Walking in Jerusalem just like John

On New Years Day, 1911, Julius Rosenwald arrived at a fundraising event in Chicago and gave his first-ever speech in front of a large Black audience.

“I belong to a race that in times gone by did not have a fair chance in life,” he told the crowd of around 500. “I feel a peculiar sympathy with a race that does not have a fair chance under the existing conditions of American life.”

At the time, the YMCA of Chicago was looking to open its first branch for Black residents and it needed money.

Already a multi-millionaire who dedicated much of his life toward charitable causes, Rosenwald offered the organization $25,000, but only if an additional $75,000 could be raised from the local community.

Born in the mid-19th Century, Rosenwald had what writer and historian Stephanie Deutsch calls a “very typical story for Jewish immigrants.”

Deutsch is author of “You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South.” She is also married to Rosenwald’s great-grandson.

In her book, Deutsch explains that Rosenwald’s family first arrived in the United States in 1854.

“They left to escape special taxes and laws restricting where they could live, when they could marry, and what professions they could choose,” she wrote. “These burdens, based on age-old prejudice, had limited the lives of Jews in Europe for hundreds of years.”

Rosenwald came from a family of shopkeepers and spent his formative years working in his father’s clothing store.

“Julius was never able to complete high school,” said Deutsch. “When he was 16, his parents sent him to live in New York, where he had uncles who were successful in the wholesale clothing business.”

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Rosenwald eventually moved back to Chicago and in 1896, bought into a mail-order catalog company called Sears, Roebuck and Company, more popularly known as just Sears.

“The business just exploded,” said Deutsch. 

In 1900, still operating out of a handful of buildings scattered throughout Chicago, Sears generated $10 million in sales. Then just a few years later, Sears had an initial public offering and Rosenwald was paid a dividend of $2 million.

“Suddenly,” wrote Deutsch. “Julius Rosenwald was rich.”

Sears would eventually expand into a nationwide empire, making Rosenwald one of the richest people in the world. But starting in the early 20th Century, he started putting large sums of money toward causes benefiting Jews and Black Americans.

“These two issues moved him deeply, more than others,” wrote historian Hasia Diner in her book “Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World.” “And to them, he gave the greatest amount of his time and money.”

Rosenwald almost never fully bankrolled a project or initiative.

“He gave lavishly and generously to a number of philanthropies,” Diner wrote, “but always insisted that his contributions be matched by others, never wanting to be the sole donor.”

To receive money from Rosenwald, organizations, communities, and local governments needed skin in the game. This philosophy of charitable giving squared neatly with Booker T. Washington’s message of self-help.

This is why in 1911, Washington asked Rosenwald to join the school’s board of trustees, one of his methods of expanding the Tuskegee empire.

Already a large benefactor to Black social causes, the Sears titan made for a natural ally to the former slave who ran a school in the Alabama Black Belt. But before joining the administration, he needed to see it first.

“Julius Rosenwald filled a private train car with some of his friends from Chicago. He took his rabbi,” said Deutsch. “They went down to Tuskegee and spent three days there on the campus meeting the students, meeting the teachers.”

Rosenwald’s philanthropic efforts were largely inspired by two books. 

The first, and most influential, was “An American Citizen: The Life of William Henry Baldwin,” a biography about a railroad executive who used his wealth to fund social causes. The second was “Up From Slavery.”

Rosenwald’s visit to Tuskegee further reinforced the idea that Washington was the leading authority on the needs of Black America.

“I was astonished by the progressiveness of the school,” Rosenwald told the Chicago Tribune after the visit. “I don’t believe there is a white industrial school in America or anywhere else that compares with Mr. Washington’s at Tuskegee.”

A year after his trip, Rosenwald signed on as a trustee and made a donation of $25,000 to Tuskegee. Somebody on staff suggested that part of this money be used to subsidize the construction of Black schools in neighboring communities.

“They built six schools. $350 from Rosenwald. $350 raised by the community,” said Deutsch. “That was a huge amount of money for these people to raise, but they did.”

These early Rosenwald Schools were rudimentary by contemporary standards – one-story pier and beam structures with desks and chalk boards. But they were just the start.

In 1914, Rosenwald told Washington that he would donate an additional $30,000 to help build a hundred schools. 

“When this plan was made public, an extraordinary avalanche of letters cascaded onto the desks of each man,” wrote Deutsch. “Teachers, ministers, shopkeepers, and other local leaders from across the South wrote to both Rosenwald and Washington asking how they could get schools in their communities.”

“Whether it is because I belong to a people who have known centuries of persecution, or whether it is because I am naturally inclined to sympathize with the oppressed. I have always felt keenly for the colored race.” 

A year later, Booker T. Washington died at home in Tuskegee. But by then, the concept was proven.

“Julius Rosenwald decided to remove the program from Tuskegee and set up his own office to run the program,” said Deutsch. “From there, up until the program ended in 1932, they built what ended up being almost 5,000 schools.”

In 2009, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder published academic research looking at the impact of the Rosenwald Fund, the nonprofit that administered Rosenwald’s charitable donations.

The economists note that when the Fund first started, it subsidized about a quarter of the construction costs of the schools it helped build, but over time declined as states and counties became more involved in Black education.

“64 percent of funding came from local government sources,”  Aaronson and Mazumder wrote about the program’s scope. “Another 20 percent from private sources, and only 15 percent from the Rosenwald Fund.”

Rosenwald’s money didn’t solve educational inequality, but it made early efforts at Black education a partnership between local authorities, the Black communities looking to educate their children, and Julius Rosenwald.

By the time the Rosenwald Fund wound down in the late 1940s, around 5,000 schools had been constructed with help of the Sears magnate. In total, Rosenwald gave around $4.3 million to subsidize rural school construction. $6 million came from local communities.

“Rosenwald really liked that idea, that he’s not going to give a school,” said Deutsch, “but he would help a community build a school.”

For the remainder of his life, Julius Rosenwald helped fund the construction of rural Black schools. When he passed away in 1932, students at Tuskegee gathered and sang his favorite spiritual.

“I want to be ready,” the refrain goes. “I want to be ready to walk in Jerusalem just like John.”

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