Between 1917 and 1932, Black communities across the American South built more than 5,000 schools for their children. They did this with their own money, their own labor, and their own land — because the states where they lived, which collected their taxes, refused to build adequate schools for Black children. The Julius Rosenwald Fund provided seed money and architectural plans. Booker T. Washington provided the organizational framework. But the schools were built by Black families who were themselves living in poverty, who raised matching funds at church suppers and community meetings, who donated land and contributed carpentry and masonry, who understood that the state was not going to educate their children and decided to do it themselves. The result was the most significant private school construction program in American history — and one of the least taught.
Julius Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company and one of the wealthiest men in America. In 1912 he visited Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and met Booker T. Washington. Washington had been arguing for years that the most urgent need in Black Southern communities was basic education infrastructure — not universities, not professional schools, but elementary schools with adequate buildings, trained teachers, and basic supplies. State governments across the South were spending ten to twenty times more per white student than per Black student, maintaining a two-tier system that left Black children in deteriorating one-room structures with no heat, no books, and teachers who were themselves barely educated because there had been nowhere to educate them. Rosenwald agreed to fund a pilot program. The results were so clear that he expanded it into a systematic initiative that would operate for fifteen years.
The design of the Rosenwald program was deliberate and shrewd. The Fund would contribute a portion of the construction cost — typically between 15 and 20 percent — but only if the local Black community raised matching funds and the local white school board agreed to accept the school into the public system and pay the teachers’ salaries. This structure forced three things simultaneously: Black community investment and ownership, white institutional acknowledgment of responsibility, and the creation of permanent public infrastructure that would outlast the Fund’s involvement. It also meant that every Rosenwald school represented a negotiation — Black community leaders working with white school boards that often resented the implicit criticism of their neglect, extracting commitments that would not otherwise have been made.
North Carolina built 813 Rosenwald schools — more than any other state. They were built in every county with a significant Black population, in communities that had been waiting for decades for the state to fulfill its obligations. Cumberland County received several of these schools, organized in significant part by Anne Chesnutt Waddell, the county’s Jeanes Supervisor, who spent twenty-two years navigating the bureaucratic and political obstacles between Black children and adequate education. The schools she helped build served generations of Cumberland County families. Some of those buildings still stand — they are among the most significant architectural records of Black community self-determination in North Carolina history.
The Rosenwald Fund ended in 1948, by design — Julius Rosenwald had stipulated that the Fund should spend itself out rather than becoming a permanent institution. By then the 5,357 schools it had helped build had educated hundreds of thousands of Black children across fifteen Southern states. Many of those children went on to HBCUs, to professional careers, to civic leadership. The Tuskegee Airmen included graduates of Rosenwald schools. Civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s had learned to read in Rosenwald schools. John Lewis attended a Rosenwald school in Alabama. The investment those Black communities made in their children — raising money they could not afford to give, building schools the state should have built — produced the generation that would finally force the state to change its laws.