On the heels of Black History Month, it is noteworthy to remember how two men from radically different backgrounds and upbringings, giants in their own domains, forged an alliance/coalition that began around a common cause—the education of underserved and underprivileged African Americans in the rural South. The fruits of their labors had significant impact across at least several generations and its ripple effect is felt even today.
The contrast between the two men, Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, and the paths they took in life, was significant, yet they bonded immediately. Washington, a plantation-born freed slave was highly educated, and in his own right, a pioneer in African American education in the South. He had founded the prestigious Tuskegee Institute and sought to ameliorate discriminatory practices, such as the pervasive Jim Crow laws. Washington catalyzed the growth of institutions to help African Americans thrive in multiple arenas, including business (he founded the National Negro Business League) that affected them after Reconstruction.
Rosenwald was a high-school dropout, the son of Jewish immigrants from Germany to the Midwest. He had rebounded from bankruptcy and multiple business failures to become chairman and part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company. This Minneapolis company began by manufacturing and selling watches. By the time Rosenwald joined the firm, it was a Chicago-based catalog manufacturer and distributor of clothing, tools and other durable merchandise for farm households. Sears expanded exponentially, and was, at one point, the top national retailer.
The two men, despite differences in their origins, forged a deep friendship, and then an alliance based on empathy and shared goals. The Washington-Rosenwald friendship began thus: In 1910, Rosenwald’s friend Paul Sachs (son of the founder of Goldman Sachs) gave him a copy of Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery.” It deeply touched Rosenwald, whose ancestors had suffered millennia of slavery, persecution and expulsion, and whose own parents had fled Germany because of antisemitism and poverty. Moved by how racial disparities in the South were keeping African Americans oppressed and unable to break loose of poverty and career barriers due to segregation and lack of proper educational facilities and resources, Rosenwald asked to meet with Washington.
In 1911, this meeting took place, and Rosenwald became increasingly aware of how, aside from all the social and political obstacles that African Americans faced, escape from the cycle of poverty was nearly impossible. The obstacles to economic self-sufficiency were, for a start, deeply rooted in the staggering differential between monies spent on African Americans’ education and that of white Southerners. “Separate but equal,” a legal principle based on a Louisiana law of 1890, and confirmed by the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1896, was a misnomer.
Realistically, the “separate” part of the phrase was operational, but the resources allocated to African Americans, as compared to those of whites, were grossly unequal. Once Washington had told Rosenwald of the state of African American education, the two men worked together and created an alliance/coalition to build schools across the rural South. The term “coalition” fits because of all the public relations and collective efforts needed to make Washington’s and Rosenwald’s conceptualization of a network of schools move from dream to blueprints to buildings. Washington and Rosenwald developed a major educational campaign that resulted in the construction of more than 5,300 schools for African American students in 15 states, primarily in the rural South. Rosenwald also joined the board of the Tuskegee Institute and served there until his death.
The hope for the Rosenwald Schools was that they would reverse the status quo for African Americans by raising the educational bar and thus augment their hopes for a better future. Over the next two decades, the Rosenwald Schools were constructed, not only by allocating Rosenwald’s funds designated for this project, but also by his active participation, working together with those planning and constructing them, and in the public discourse and public relations that transpired during this period. Prominent architects, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright, and educational leaders were consulted in the planning stage, and some of them participated in the construction phase of the project.
The fund established by Rosenwald then supported other initiatives to improve the lives and increase the dignity and rights of African Americans throughout the United States. These included, among other public interest ventures, direct grants to African American writers, artists and intellectuals, and a public health pilot project. In 1948, the Rosenwald Fund was depleted.
Although there are still major barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) among African Americans and other groups in society, the seeds to achieve DEI, planted well over a century ago, stemmed from a friendship between a freed slave and acclaimed educator and a Jewish businessman, and represent an historical precedent that segued to ongoing involvement by Jews in the civil rights movement and ongoing DEI initiatives. That starting point, the Rosenwald Fund’s schools project, had a profound impact on the lives of so many, including renowned African Americans—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson, author Maya Angelou, the late Congressman John Lewis, and civil rights activist Julian Bond, among others.
It is important to remember how the alliance between Rosenwald and Washington in the early 20th century achieved educational progress for African Americans in many areas of the rural South, and how gradually, educational progress segued to economic advancement. It was a forerunner to the social and political activism that resulted in desegregation legislation and the beginnings of social justice via the civil rights movement. Public relations techniques were successfully used to overcome opposition to the schools by segregationists, and these schools’ success segued to other Rosenwald Fund projects. Advancements in other areas of African American life in the U.S. were slower to materialize, and there are still multiple areas where there are significant discrepancies between what people of color and others can access. Nevertheless, in our fragmented, factionalized society, the relationship between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald has had long-term, prosocial impact.
Rachel Kovacs is an adjunct associate professor of communication at CUNY, a PR professional, theater reviewer for offoffonline.com—and a Judaics teacher. She trained in performance at Brandeis and Manchester Universities, Sharon Playhouse, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She can be reached at
[email protected].
