Rosenwald Schools in Virginia, Southern Workman Article, 1922

Prior to the Civil War, Virginia did not have a statewide public education system. Wealthy Virginians, including some free Black people, sent their children to private academies or hired tutors. The state maintained a fund to provide education for a limited number of poor white children. It was illegal to educate enslaved people in groups. In 1870, the General Assembly passed An Act to Establish and Maintain a Uniform System of Public Free Schools. This law mandated school segregation. Although theoretically the segregated schools should have been equal in number and quality, they were not. State government and the counties and cities regularly underfunded the schools. Black students often attended school in dilapidated buildings with inadequate facilities and castoff textbooks.

To address educational and financial disparities that Black schools faced during the Jim Crow period, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald worked with noted Black leader and Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington to help provide resources. The founder of Sears Roebuck and Company, Rosenwald spent about $4.4 million to help build 5,350 schools across the south between 1912 and 1932. The Rosenwald Fund provided up to half the cost of a school in a community while local residents had to provide the remainder of the total cost through in-kind donations or cash. During this time, Black communities across Virginia raised enough money to secure 382 Rosenwald schools in 79 counties. Most of these schools followed the Rosenwald blueprints, which accommodated one or two teachers using Tuskegee Institute-designed floorplans intended to maximize space and light on a small footprint.

The Rosenwald schools often served rural communities, and by 1928, an estimated twenty percent of all Black students attended a Rosenwald school. The program ended after Rosenwald’s death in 1932, but the schools continued to operate, in many cases long after schools desegregated. Some were incorporated into new plans for desegregated schools during the 1950s and 1960s. Others fell into disrepair and were abandoned. Today, local activists who sometimes include former students work to preserve Rosenwald schools as community centers and museums, which stand as a testament to the efforts by Black Virginians to educate students in the era of segregation.

In 1922, William D. Gresham, the state Supervisor for Negro Education, published an article about Virginia's Rosenwald Schools in The Southern Workman, published by Hampton Institute. In it, he describes the requirements for and process of establishing local Rosenwald schools. 

Citation: William D. Gresham, “Rosenwald Schools in Virginia,” The Southern Workman 51 (April 1922), 169-175.

View the Southern Workman online at Virginia Chronicle.

VS.6, USII.5, CE.6, VUS.12, VUS.16

Preview Activity

Take a look: Look at the before and after images of the schools in the Southern Workman article.  How would you describe the differences? Why do you think the older schools looked the way they did? How would you think it would feel to move from the original school to a Rosenwald school, and why?

Post-Activities

Think About It: How does Gresham describe the Rosenwald schools in the Southern Workman article? What conditions did the Rosenwald fund require, and why? How does Gresham assert the importance of teachers in these communities, and how do you think teachers would react to his claims?

Think About It: The 1896 Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v Ferguson allowed for segregation if facilities were equal. What evidence do you see here that school funding was not equal in the state of Virginia at the time this article was written?