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A few minutes drive from the small town of Warm Springs, GA, I turn down a tiny road that winds around through thick woods with small homes and modest trailers. At the crest of a hill, an imposing old brick building, in contrast to the neighborhood, stands in the sunlight: almost preening, as if she’s proud that she is still standing after all these years.
I had found the Eleanor Roosevelt School, the last school built by the Rosenwald Foundation and named for the wife of the president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I was there to meet Debron and Voncher Walker, brother and sister who have acquired this 85 year old school with plans to restore the building.
The story of Rosenwald schools, how they came to be, and their legacy is closely intertwined with the sad history of the Jim Crow South and segregation, as well as the importance of education to Black Southerners, and as a catalyst for the migration of many African Americans from the South.
At the end of the Civil War after the freeing of enslaved people, public schools systems around the South mostly avoided their duty to educate Black children. Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had developed a friendship with Julius Rosenwald, a founder of Sears Roebuck, and later a philanthropist who donated substantial amounts of money to the Tuskegee Institute. Washington, near the end of his life, suggested to Rosenwald in 1912 that schools were needed for younger, rural Black children.
From this seed of an idea, Rosenwald created a foundation and started funding the construction of schools across the South, eventually building close to 5,000. Also, with the help of architecture students from Tuskegee, he developed templates for school designs that were characterized by large windows, simple, wood-frame construction, and clean, unadorned lines. Some of these design features were copied by school boards for white schools. Most of the Rosenwald schools were fairly small, in part because the white school systems were not required to provide buses for Black children; thus the schools had to be within walking distance for neighborhood children.
Central to the Rosenwald model was that Black communities would have to request the construction of a school. Also, each community was required to contribute either funds, land, or labor to the project. And the white public school system in the locale had to agree to pay teachers, provide textbooks, and operate the school. The Rosenwald schools became part of the public school system in a county, even though typically the school boards treated these schools for Black children as separate and unequal in terms of financial and academic support.
After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, school systems began the slow and sometimes painful integration of education across the South. The Rosenwald buildings were abandoned, some torn down and others left to decay. Of the 5,357 schools, shops, and teacher homes constructed between 1917 and 1932, only around 10 percent are estimated to survive today.
A number of Rosenwald schools are being restored for use as community centers, museums, or other purposes, and a handful of these restored schools are in Georgia. Andrew Feiler, a photojournalist who last year published a book of photographs and stories of the Rosenwald schools, says, “There is an inherent plea in my body of work for historic preservation, because these spaces, and these places are the locus of history and memory in our communities.” More information about his book and exhibits can be found here.
The Eleanor Roosevelt School in Warm Springs that the Walker siblings are starting to restore has the distinction of being the very last school built with Rosenwald seed funding. FDR came to Warm Springs seeking treatment for his polio. He established the Little White House and spent much time there, and around Georgia, developing a fondness for the people and the landscape. The Rosenwald Fund stopped funding schools after Rosenwald’s death in 1932. However, the Black community in Warm Springs felt that President Roosevelt had promised them a school. A community member reminded Roosevelt of this promise, and the president imposed on the Rosenwald Fund to contribute to one last school. Construction started in 1936, and the school opened in 1937, named after the president’s wife Eleanor. The school operated from then until 1972.
The effect the Rosenwald schools had on Black families, race relations, and the course of U.S. history is hard to overstate. At their height, it is estimated that one third of Southern Black children were attending a Rosenwald school. Over four decades, approximately 700,000 Black children had attended one of the schools. Their education helped lay the foundation for success for many of them. A number of the leaders in the civil rights movement attended Rosenwald schools including Maya Angelou and John Lewis. Countless other foot soldiers of the movement went through Rosenwald schools.
Two economists, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, after extensive research, concluded that the Rosenwald Schools were a contributing factor to the start of the flood of Black Southerners leaving the South in larger numbers beginning in the early 20th century. In the abstract of their 2011 academic journal article, they write, “The black-white gap in schooling among southern-born men narrowed sharply between the world wars...Using census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural southern blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.”
In addition to funding school construction across the South, Rosenwald set a high bar for philanthropy and social justice that was significantly ahead of his time. First, as a wealthy, Northern Jew, he formed a bond with African Americans. This action set a tone for collaboration and support between the two groups that still exists today. Second, unlike other titans of industry, he was a modest man who did not want to build monuments to himself. He stipulated that his foundation should give away all his wealth after his death. This “sunset” provision was new to philanthropy.
The Walker siblings are just getting started, having owned the building for about two years now. They plan to restore the building and have an historic classroom replica, an event space, and demonstration community agriculture on the five acre property. “This school building is a reflection of the community,” says Debron. “When they come through here, they go right back to third grade, fifth grade. So there's a connection, that's a part of who they are. And the thing about that is, you know, it's our job, to be the stewards and be the storytellers with them.” The Walkers talk about their vision for the school in this short video.
Georgia resident Dan White, executive producer of the FDR film A President in Our Midst says, “This will certainly be a complement to the activities at the Little White House and the Roosevelt Institute. It will round out the whole experience of the Warm Springs area. And I’m sure that Eleanor Roosevelt would be so pleased that young African American siblings are restoring and repurposing her namesake school.”
“We live in this George Floyd moment of American reckoning,” observes Feiler. "There's deep division in America around issues related to the diversification of America. Yet there's something instructive about this 1912 American story reaching across not just race, but also religion and region, and bringing fundamental change to this country. The Rosenwald schools are an important illustration for people crying out for social change in America, and for evidence that our individual actions do matter."
Too often places like the Rosenwald school in Warm Springs, where significant African American history occurred, go completely unrecognized. But there’s an important movement happening now to preserve and protect places that have been overlooked in American history that represent centuries of African American struggle, activism, and resilience. We must tell stories that reflect our complex and difficult past—and the preservation of Rosenwald schools does just that.
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