External links
- "Historic Black Schools Restored as Landmarks", New York Times, Jan. 15, 2010
- Diane Granat, "Saving the Rosenwald Schools"
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The Rosenwald Fund (also known as the Rosenwald Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation) was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind".
The fund donated a total of $70 million dollars, the equivalent of almost $1 billion in 2026 dollars.
It funded public schools especially in rural areas as well as colleges and universities, libraries, museums, Jewish charities, and African American institutions.
The Rosenwald Fund also gave 999 fellowships to African-Americans, spanning the arts, sciences, and scholarship. The Fund also supported 538 southern Whites who were working to improve race relations and social justice.
According to the Fisk University Library Archives it had a large historical impact on the generation before civil rights and played a major role in bolstering the careers of black artists, authors, and scholars during the period of Jim Crow segregation and the Great Depression. Many of the fellowship recipients became leaders of the civil rights movement and contributed significantly to the landmark Supreme Court case against segregation of public schools, Brown vs Board of Education.
Rosenwald, who was president of Sears, Roebuck and Company from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its board of directors until his death in 1932, had a unique approach (then considered innovative) to philanthropy: "matching grants" were intended to increase local commitment to projects, so the fund required that local communities raise matching funds/ and or labor to the schools. The “give while you live" approach stipulated that the Rosenwald Fund terminate within 25 years of his death (1932). Its funds were depleted in 1948.
The rural school building program for African-American children was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund. Over $4.4 million in matching funds stimulated construction of more than 5,000 one-room schools (and larger ones), as well as shops and teachers' homes, mostly in the South, where public schools were segregated and black schools had been chronically underfunded. This was particularly so after disenfranchisement of most blacks from the political system in southern states at the turn of the 20th century. The Fund required white school boards to agree to operate such schools and to arrange for matching funds, in addition to requiring black communities to raise funds or donate property and labor to construct the schools. These schools, constructed to models designed by architects of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now known as Tuskegee University), became known as "Rosenwald Schools." In some communities, surviving structures have been preserved and recognized as landmarks for their historical character and social significance. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has classified them as National Treasures.
Two exhibits at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC highlight this impact. One exhibition is entitled, "A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America." The second entitled: "The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph x Fry & Welch" discusses the Rosenwald Schools within a broader context of the influence of education and architecture influenced Black community and history.
The Fund also provided for library programs from the late 1920s into the 1940s. These programs supplied book collections to rural schools, supported college libraries, helped train Black librarians, and funded county library demonstrations aimed at extending service (often on a biracial basis) in the South.
From 1929–1930 to 1935 the Fund put about $500,000 into eleven county libraries in seven Southern states. Equal service was not achieved. Collections available to African Americans were far smaller on a per-capita basis, branches and hours were fewer, and no county developed a fully satisfactory system of distribution to Black readers.
Professional training for Black librarians was concentrated at the Hampton Institute Library School in Virginia (1925–1939). The Carnegie Corporation, the General Education Board, and the Rosenwald Fund all backed Hampton specifically for African American students; it graduated roughly 180 librarians before it closed.
Assessments of the program at the time were conducted by Tommie Dora Barker, the American Library Association regional field agent for the South.
A history of the Fund’s library program covering the 10,000 school, college, and public libraries supported, library-science training for African American librarians, and the push for local tax support, by Aisha M. Johnson-Jones, The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program, was published in 2019.
The Rosenwald Fund invested $1,655,000 in fellowship grants directly to African-American artists, writers, researchers and intellectuals as well as promising white Southerners between 1928 and 1948. (Prior to this, William Samuel Quinland was funded in 1919.) Civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose father received a Rosenwald fellowship, called the list of grantees a "Who's Who of black America in the 1930s and 1940s". Close to one thousand grants were disbursed to Black artists, writers and other cultural figures, many of whom became prominent or already were, including photographers Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Catlett, Marion Palfi, poets Claude McKay, Dr. Charles Drew, Augusta Savage, anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham, singer Marian Anderson, silversmith Winifred Mason, writers Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, dermatologist Theodore K. Lawless, and poets Langston Hughes and Rita Dove. 538 fellowhips were granted to white southerners. Fellowships of between $1,000 to $2,000 were given out yearly to applicants and were usually designed to be open-ended; the Foundation requested but did not require grantees to report back on what they accomplished with the support.
The Fisk University library sponsors a digital exhibit, "Women of Rosenwald: Curating Social Justice, 1928-1948", to mark the milestones of black female artists who received Rosenwald fellowships. Many of these recipients would become the first African Americans to receive recognition within their various fields. Marian Anderson was the first African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera. Mildred Blount became the first African American member of the Motion Pictures Customer Union. Lenora G. Lafayette was the first African American singer to perform in an English opera house.
In 1929, the Rosenwald Fund funded a syphilis treatment pilot program in five Southern states. The Rosenwald project emphasized locating people with syphilis and treating them, during a time when syphilis was widespread in poor African-American communities. The Fund ended its involvement in 1932, due to lack of matching state funds (the Fund required jurisdictions to contribute to efforts to increase collaboration on solving problems). After the Fund ceased its involvement, the federal government decided to take over the funding and changed its mission to being a non-therapeutic study. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study began later that year, tracking the progress of untreated disease, and took advantage of poor participants by not informing them fully of its constraints. Even after penicillin became recognized as approved treatment for this disease, researchers did not treat the study participants.
Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, the Rosenwald Fund was designed to expend all of its funds for philanthropic purposes before a predetermined "sunset date." It donated over $70 million to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities, and African American institutions before funds were completely depleted in 1948.
This is a selected list of notable Rosenwald Fund Fellowship recipients from the years the fund's fellowship program was active, 1928-1948. A full list can be found in the appendix of A Force for Change and the Julius Rosenwald Fund and also in Investment in People by E R Embree.
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