The Rosenwald Schools of the American South
By Wood, Andrew J
The Rosenwald Schools of the American South. By Mary S. Hoffschwelle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xx, 401 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8130-2957-0. The latest volume in the “New Perspectives on the American South” series from the University Press of Florida, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South tells the remarkable story of interracial public-private cooperation to better public education for African Americans in the South through new school construction. In 1912, Julius Rosenwald, Jewish president of Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Booker T. Washington of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute formed an alliance that transformed public education and the built environment in fifteen states across the South. Riding the progressive era wave of school building, the Rosenwald building program helped construct over five thousand schools. By the time the program ended in 1932, its schools housed a third of the South’s black public school students and teachers, accounted for a fifth of the South’s public schools and just under one third of their property value. They helped dramatically increase school attendance, instructional hours, and literacy among African American southerners.
Hoffschwelle, author of Preserving Rosenwald Schools (Washington, D.C., 2003) and Rebuilding the Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900-1930 (Knoxville, 1998), here envisions the Rosenwald building program and schools “as an evolving, multilayered network of people and buildings that produced significant landscapes of identity and social change” (p. 1). Rosenwald Schools explores “the processes by which people create, use, and invest meaning in the material world” (p. 3). Hoffschwelle interprets the program “from the inside out, focused on the internal development of the building program and looking out from it to the broader arena of black education in the South, to understand its distinctive and enduring power as an agency for change” (p. 2).
The Rosenwald program motivated public investment and broader involvement in African American education in the South. In the process, it “created a stage upon which many different people could act” (p. 2). Rosenwald preferred matching grants to, as Hoffschwelle puts it, “philanthropy that relieved local people and governments of their own responsibilities” (p. 82). Of the moneys expended on the Rosenwald schools, 64 percent came from tax revenues, 17 percent from African Americans, 15 percent from Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund, and just over 4 percent from other private white donors.
Concerned about a lack of professionalism and efficiency at Tuskegee, Rosenwald moved the program to Nashville in 1920 and placed it under the control of white officials. The progressives now in charge stressed the need for “model” schools. The change resulted in increasingly expensive plans that taxed the ability of the neediest black communities to match Rosenwald grants (p. 83). Thus, impoverished African American communities were doubly taxed to build schools for which their taxes should have provided. That so many embraced “sacrificial giving” confirmed their active and enduring commitment to “education as a cultural value and a social right” (p. 17). Rosenwald’s death in 1932 ended the program, forcing new school advocates to seek federal funding.
Hoffschwelle stresses the program’s meaning for African Americans. A Rosenwald school building constituted a “new modern place in a southern African American community,” a symbol of “collective achievement” expressing “not only the architectural vision of its planners but the community vision of the people who used its spaces” (pp. 245, 259). Communities named most Rosenwald schools for local churches or places, “integrating the completed building into the African American landscape” (p. 256). The Rosenwald schools became a cherished “part of the cultural capital held by their communities” (p.273).
Photos and other illustrative materials in Rosenwald Schools are singularly impressive, a gratifying and unusual departure from recent publishing trends. The illustrations interspersed throughout the book add significantly to the story, and its well-produced floor plans, elevations, and photographs enable this volume to function as a helpful guide for travelers and local historians. Although Hoffschwelle notes that “the bulk of funds expended on Rosenwald Schools came from public sources,” she pays less attention to public deliberations than to those of Rosenwald agents and community blacks (p. 242). Hoffschwelle affirms the importance of black churches and ministers in rallying support for schools but does not detail that role as fully as she might have.
Overall, Hoffschwelle doesjustice to this significant chapter of the southern experience. For African Americans across the South, a Rosenwald school in their community symbolized “the visible result of [their] initiative and persistence” (p. 264). Many of the buildings made possible by their sacrifice remain part of the southern landscape. Scholars and laypersons interested in educational history, African American history, Progressive reform and philanthropy, architecture, and material culture will be especially interested in this excellent volume.
ANDREW J. WOOD
Auburn University
Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 2007
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