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The greatest 20th century donor you've never heard of

By Martin Morse Wooster - posted Wednesday, 2 August 2006


“This was a brilliant statement,” Ascoli observes. Washington had spent enough time with Rosenwald to understand his patron’s ultimate goal: that “the work of building and raising funds for these schools would somehow bring the two races closer together.” Rosenwald had never explicitly said this in his conversations with Washington. Yet Washington, a sympathetic listener, understood his patron’s deepest desires - and Washington’s skill at understanding Rosenwald’s hidden motives increased Rosenwald’s desire to give.

Dramatic expansion of the Rosenwald Schools

In June 1914 Rosenwald and Washington concluded an agreement in which the school construction program would be expanded to 100 additional schools. Rosenwald would pay between one-quarter and one-third of the cost of construction, and Sears, Roebuck would donate building supplies. But in order to be eligible for the grant, state and local governments had to agree to pay for half the cost of the schools. The final 25 per cent had to be raised from parents or other members of the community. For in order to build a “Rosenwald School,” local citizens had to contribute money or time. Historian Daniel Boorstin notes that these local contributions were crucial to determining which towns would get a Rosenwald School. “No one would be helped unless the person himself was willing to make an effort to help himself. The passive beneficiary,” Boorstin concludes, “had no place in this scheme”.

Black southerners went to extraordinary lengths to make sure their town had a Rosenwald school. Diane Granat, who studied the Rosenwald Schools for the Alicia Patterson Foundation, observes that in one community, “struggling sharecroppers set aside an area planted with cotton as the ‘Rosenwald Patch.’” Parents whose children went to Rosenwald schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, routinely held fried-chicken suppers and pick-up baseball games as fund-raisers.

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One anonymous observer left a detailed description of the lengths the citizens of Boligee, Alabama, went to obtain a Rosenwald school in 1916. The local cotton crop had been ravaged by the boll weevil and many contributors were field hands who walked four miles through the mud to get to the meeting site.

“You would have been overawed with emotion if you could have seen these poor people walking up to the table, emptying their pockets for a school,” the observer wrote. “One old man, who had seen slavery days, with all of his life’s earnings in an old greasy sack, slowly drew it from his pocket, and emptied it on the table. I have never seen such a pile of nickels, pennies, dimes, dollars, etc. in my life. He put 38 dollars on the table, which was his entire savings.”

Because blacks had to donate some of the cost of the school’s construction, they thought a Rosenwald school was theirs, even if a local government ran the school. And these struggling African Americans knew that a good school was the first step towards enabling their children and grandchildren to climb out of poverty.

Over 70 years after plans for a Rosenwald school were first announced for Northumberland County, Virginia, Alice Dameron vividly recalled the joy local African Americans had when they learned they would get a new school. “Parents and grandparents of those schoolchildren,” wrote Dameron, “were from families of former slaves who had been accustomed to hardships, denials, segregation, and the struggles for mere existence after the Civil War. To own a piece of land, clean it up, and call it home was their first goal. To see to it that the present would live better than the past by providing opportunities was their next goal.”

After Rosenwald decided to scale up the school construction program, he also stepped back from day-to-day management of the project. He hired William C. Graves to review grant proposals and to deal with a lot of the paperwork for the project.

Yet Rosenwald remained intimately involved with the program. He regularly took others on his site visits to Alabama. On a trip in February 1915, for example, 41 people went to Alabama as Rosenwald’s guests. These included potential donors, such as meatpacking heir Harold Swift, prominent social workers such as Grace Abbott, Jane Addams, and Sophonisba Breckenridge; and heads of non-profits, such as Mrs Kellogg Fairbank, president of the Chicago Lying-In Hospital.

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Ascoli writes that these observers saw the way the construction of the Rosenwald schools acted as a catalyst to revitalise downtrodden communities. “People painted or whitewashed their homes,” he writes, “and cleaned up their gardens so that the community would be deemed worthy of a new building.”

Washington died in 1915 and Rosenwald’s relationship with Washington’s successor at Tuskegee was frosty. But Rosenwald kept the school construction program going. By the time of his death in 1932, he had contributed $4.4 million towards the construction of an astonishing 5,357 Southern schools, which was matched by $18.1 million in government funds, $1.2 million from other foundations, and $4.7 million in contributions from blacks. Had Rosenwald not started the program, it’s unlikely any of these schools would have been built.

Rosenwald’s giving was not limited to causes benefitting blacks. He was the major contributor to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and resisted attempts to have the building named the “Rosenwald Museum”. He was also a generous contributor to Jewish causes, including a major effort to save the lives of Jews in the Soviet Union by creating a “colony” inside the USSR where Jews could live. This project failed because the Soviet Union defaulted on the millions of dollars of bonds that Rosenwald and other prominent donors had purchased to fund the venture.

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First published in Philanthropy magazine on May 1 2006.



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About the Author

Martin Morse Wooster is a graduate of the conservative National Journalism Center, and a prolific writer spanning his interests from science fiction writing to philanthropy and education policy. Wooster's career has included stints as the Washington editor of Harper's, as well as editorial roles with conservative publications, Reason, and American Enterprise as well as a columnist for the Washington Times, a special correspondent for Network News Service and as Washington investigator for Robin Moore.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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