Rosenwald school

In informal usage, a Rosenwald School was any of the over five thousand schools, shops, and teachers' homes in the United States which were built primarily for the education of African-American children in the South in the early 20th century. The project was the product of the partnership of Julius Rosenwald, an American clothier who became part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company and the African American leader Booker T. Washington.

The need arose from the chronic underfunding of public education for African-American children in the South, as black people had been disenfranchised at the turn of the century and excluded from the political system in that region. Children were required to attend racially segregated schools.

Rosenwald was the founder of The Rosenwald Fund. He contributed seed money for many of the schools and other philanthropic causes, requiring local communities to raise matching funds to increase their commitment to these projects.

To promote collaboration between white and black citizens, Rosenwald required communities to commit public funds and/or labor to the schools, as well as to contribute additional cash donations. White school boards had to agree to operate and maintain the schools, and millions of dollars were raised by African-American rural communities across the South to fund better education for their children. Despite this program, by the mid-1930s, white schools in the South were worth, per student, more than five times what black schools were worth per student (in majority-black Mississippi, this ratio was more than 13 to one).

In the segregated schools of the South, African American children were sent to woefully underfunded schools. The collaboration of Rosenwald and Washington led to the construction of almost 5,000 schools for black children in the eleven states of the former Confederacy as well as Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. As a result of their collaboration approximately one-third of African American children were educated in these schools.

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