Rosenwald School

The Rosenwald School project built more than 5,000 schools, shops, and teacher homes in the United States primarily for the education of African-American children in the South during the early 20th century. The project was the product of the partnership of Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish-American clothier who became part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company and the African-American leader, educator, and philanthropist Booker T. Washington, who was president of the Tuskegee Institute.

The need arose from the chronic underfunding of public education for African-American children in the South, as black people had been discriminated against at the turn of the 20th century and excluded from the political system in that region. Children were permitted to attend only segregated schools, which did not exist in many places.

Rosenwald was the founder of the Rosenwald Fund. He contributed seed money for many schools and other philanthropic causes. To encourage local commitment to these projects, he conditioned the Fund's support on the local communities' raising of matching funds. To promote collaboration between black and white people, Rosenwald required communities to also commit public funds and/or labor to the schools, as well as to contribute additional cash donations after construction. With the program, millions of dollars were raised by African-American rural communities across the South to fund better education for their children, and white school boards had to agree to operate and maintain the schools. Despite this program, by the mid-1930s white schools in the South had a budget per student more than five times that of black schools; in majority-black Mississippi the ratio was thirteen.