Welcome! In this guide, you will find selected library resources as well as open-access resources about Rosenwald Schools.
Upon permission, this library guide is adopted from Coastal Pine Technical College library guide, created by Carolina Culver.
The below statement is quoted from her library guide.
"Following the Civil War, the federal Freedmen's Bureau set up schools for black people throughout the South. However, the local communities and state governments typically were not supportive of efforts to educate newly freed black people. Because of this reality, black schoolchildren often learned with out-dated, hand-me-down books and supplies in rundown under-funded school buildings. In 1912, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, approached Chicago businessman and philanthropist, Julius Rosenwald, about a vision to build new school buildings for black children [in] 1912-1932" -- CPTC Library guide.
The collaboration resulted in more than 5,000 new public schools for black children in the South.
Julius Rosenwald was a philanthropist, Jewish immigrant (August 12, 1862 – January 6, 1932) who was a businessman and served on the board of directors of Tuskegee Institute that enabled him to support African-American children's education in the South. (Julius Rosenwald. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Rosenwald)
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The Rosenwald Schools: Work in Progress. Click image to begin.
Source: The Rosenwald Schools on YouTube
Trailer for the film Rosenwald. Click image to begin.
Source: Rosenwald on YouTube
Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow
"From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the preeminent African-American educator and race leader. But to historians and biographers of the last hundred years, Washington has often been described as an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade civil rights for economic and educational advancement. Thus one historian called Washington's time the "nadir of Negro life in America." Raymond W. Smock's interpretive biography explores Washington's rise from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had ever before achieved in American history. He took his own personal quest for freedom and acceptance within a harsh, racist climate and turned it into a strategy that he believed would work for millions. Was he, as later critics would charge, an Uncle Tom and a lackey of powerful white politicians and industrialists? Sifting the evidence, Mr. Smock sees Washington as a field general in a war of racial survival, his compromise a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. He lived and worked in the midst of an undeclared race war, and his plan was to find a way to survive and to flourish despite the odds against him." --Summary.
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This guide originally was created for the College of Coastal Georgia. Special thanks to CCGA librarians for allowing us to use this material. Also, special thanks to Coastal Pine Technical College library allowed us to use it.
G.R. Little Library
Elizabeth City State University
