Julius
Rosenwald
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The Rosenwald Rural
School Building
Program
The Rosenwald rural
school building program
was a major effort to
improve the quality of
public education for
African Americans in
the early
twentieth-century
South. In 1912, Julius
Rosenwald gave Booker
T. Washington
permission to use some
of the money he had
donated to Tuskegee
Institute for the
construction of six
small schools in rural
Alabama, which were
constructed and opened
in 1913 and 1914.
Pleased with the
results, Rosenwald then
agreed to fund a larger
program for schoolhouse
construction based at
Tuskegee. In 1917 he
set up the Julius
Rosenwald Fund, a
Chicago-based
philanthropic
foundation, and in 1920
the Rosenwald Fund
established an
independent office for
the school building
program in Nashville,
Tennessee. By 1928, one
in every five rural
schools for black
students in the South
was a Rosenwald school,
and these schools
housed one third of the
region's rural black
schoolchildren and
teachers. At the
program's conclusion in
1932, it had produced
4,977 new schools, 217
teachers' homes, and
163 shop buildings,
constructed at a total
cost of $28,408,520 to
serve 663,615 students
in 883 counties of 15
states.
Source: National
Trust For Historic
Preservation
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