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You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South
Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, first met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon. By charting the lives of these two men both before and after the meeting, Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement. Trim and vital at just shy of fifty, Rosenwald was the extraordinarily rich chairman of one of the nation’s largest businesses, interested in using his fortune to do good not just in his own Jewish community but also to promote the well-being of African Americans.
Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years. He had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and drunk tea with Queen Victoria, but he had also been assaulted on a street in New York City. He had suffered personal heartbreak, years of overwork, and the discouraging knowledge that, despite his optimism and considerable success, conditions for African Americans were not improving as he had assumed they would. From within his own community, Washington faced the bitter charge of accommodationism that haunts his legacy to this day. Despite their differences, the two men would work together well and their collaboration would lead to the building of five thousand schoolhouses. By the time segregation ended, the “Rosenwald Schools” that sprang from this unlikely partnership were educating one third of the South’s African American children. These schoolhouses represent a significant step in the ongoing endeavor to bring high quality education to every child in the United States—an ideal that remains to be realized even today.
Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years. He had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt and drunk tea with Queen Victoria, but he had also been assaulted on a street in New York City. He had suffered personal heartbreak, years of overwork, and the discouraging knowledge that, despite his optimism and considerable success, conditions for African Americans were not improving as he had assumed they would. From within his own community, Washington faced the bitter charge of accommodationism that haunts his legacy to this day. Despite their differences, the two men would work together well and their collaboration would lead to the building of five thousand schoolhouses. By the time segregation ended, the “Rosenwald Schools” that sprang from this unlikely partnership were educating one third of the South’s African American children. These schoolhouses represent a significant step in the ongoing endeavor to bring high quality education to every child in the United States—an ideal that remains to be realized even today.
232 pages, Paperback
First published December 30, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 20, 2015
"Inspiring" is probably the most overused word in book reviews, but in this case, it's the best possible description. The book is the story of the collaboration between Booker T. Washington, former slave and founder of the Tuskege Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, Jewish philanthropist who financed (with community matching funds) the building of thousands of schools for black children in the segregated south. As this was the early 20th century, neither man challenged segregation, but the schools were a valiant attempt at "separate but equal." The teachers were mostly Tuskege graduates, and because the project was done by community matching funds, they were definitely a reflection of community desire. People who didn't have money to donate to the schools often volunteered their labor in building them. The parents who sent their kids to the schools, often illiterate themselves, instilled in their kids a strong value for education as the means to get out of poverty. It was a mark of distinction to have a Rosenwald school in town.
Naturally, Mr. Rosenwald's Jewishness is what attracted me to this book, so I was disappointed to learn that he was Reform. Though clearly a baal tzedoka, including to his own people, he did not keep Shabbos and did not support the Zionist movement. Of course, I am proud that Rosenwald was a Jew, but I wish he'd been a frummer one. The inspiration in this book came not so much from Rosenwald the Jew as it did from the participation of everyone in connection with the schools. It's the kind of book that will make you proud of American democracy.
Naturally, Mr. Rosenwald's Jewishness is what attracted me to this book, so I was disappointed to learn that he was Reform. Though clearly a baal tzedoka, including to his own people, he did not keep Shabbos and did not support the Zionist movement. Of course, I am proud that Rosenwald was a Jew, but I wish he'd been a frummer one. The inspiration in this book came not so much from Rosenwald the Jew as it did from the participation of everyone in connection with the schools. It's the kind of book that will make you proud of American democracy.
February 27, 2013
I am fascinated about the history of the modern civil rights movement, especially as it relates to Farmville, VA. There are several Rosenwald schools in this area.
September 18, 2014
Excellent writing, impressive research and documentation. Amazing history that needs to be remembered and needed to be detailed!
The writer opened a new chapter in my knowledge of the history of education in the south. Although I grew up in Alabama, I had never heard of the Rosenwald Schools. Following up on the well documented story, I questioned my cousin, the oldest living teacher in my family. Of course she was very familiar with the history and was glad to know of the publication.
My late aunt taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Greenhill, Alabama. I cannot prove that this was one of the Rosenwald schools. She is the "Schoolteacher" in my historical novel, THE CHEROKEE AND THE SCHOOLTEACHER, to be released in 2015. (The sequel to THE CHEROKEE AND THE SLAVE)
The writer opened a new chapter in my knowledge of the history of education in the south. Although I grew up in Alabama, I had never heard of the Rosenwald Schools. Following up on the well documented story, I questioned my cousin, the oldest living teacher in my family. Of course she was very familiar with the history and was glad to know of the publication.
My late aunt taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Greenhill, Alabama. I cannot prove that this was one of the Rosenwald schools. She is the "Schoolteacher" in my historical novel, THE CHEROKEE AND THE SCHOOLTEACHER, to be released in 2015. (The sequel to THE CHEROKEE AND THE SLAVE)
June 19, 2012
Deutsch has written an inspirational book about Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck who devoted much of his life to philanthropy, helping to build close to 5000 schools for Black children in the segregated South. The best chapters in this work focus on the lives of Booker T. Washington and Rosenwald ---the stories of how these two friends from different and humble backgrounds became successful and went on to make a difference in so many lives. The reader is impressed by what Washington and Rosenwald were able to accomplish and can only wonder what these two men would say if they could see the current state of public education.
April 20, 2022
"But despite all the undeniably good things happening at Tuskegee, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, conditions for black Americans were getting not better but worse. Grimly determined reaction was eroding the unruly, uneven hopefulness of the Reconstruction years, when former slaves had taken their first steps toward freedom, leaving their places of bondage, voting in largenumbers, electing representatives to Congress, and eagerly sending their children to newly established public schools."
"Beginning in 1889, all the southern states rewrote their constitutions, creating various ways to keep blacks from exercising the voting rights they had been ensured by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments: literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, character assessment, grandfather clauses restructing voting to descendents of men who had voted three generations earlier, primaries for whites only, ballots that were deliberately made confusing."
"Slavery encouraged whites to blind themselves to the immorality of the arrangement that allowed many of them to grow rich and to think of their black slaves as intrinsically inferior. The excruciating upheaval of rebellion and war left the South humiliated and in ruins; it created feelings of guilt and resentment for many whites and economic devastation for members of both races."
"When he was asked what the greatest need was for black Americans, he always replied not rights or greater freedom but education. Rights, he said, mean little without the capacity to understand and make use of them. The first step up the ladder of self-improvement, inevitably, he felt, was education."
"Until we thus conquer urselves, I make no empty statement when I say that we shall have, especially in the Southern part of our country, a cancer growing at the heart of the Republic, that shall one day prove as dangerous as an attack from an army without or within."
"You cannot teach school in log cabins without doors, windows, lights, floor or apparatus. You need a schoolhouse and, if you are in earnest, the people will help you."
"She should not let her mind "dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other racial prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things. If one gets in the habit of continually thinking and talking about race prejudice, he soon gets to the point where he is fit for little that is worth doing."
"Rosenwald's willingness to overlook the YMCA's occasionally anti-Semitic practices was typical of his pragmatic approach and, perhaps, an indication of the fact that he himself had personally experienced very little prejudice."
"I feel a peculiar sympathy with a race that does not have a fair chance under the existing conditions of American life."
"We inherited no church houses since we became a free people-within forty five years we have erected 35,000 church buildings and in 90% of cases the money with which to erect these buildings has come out of our own pockets. And, Mr. Rosenwald, if you had not done anything else through this movement than to give the white people of this city of Chicago a chance to know the kind of colored people they have...it would have paid for itself."
"What to many blacks was a painful, even embarrasing reminder of bad times was to whites a stunningrevelation. The songs breathed life into their often scant knowledge of the South and of the black who lived there. The beauty and power of the singing could move them to tears."
"Washington explained that state goverments, maintaining two separate school systems, white and black, generally favored white schools, dividing the funds unevenly so that the black schools received very little. In Alabama, for example, where about half the children were black, white schools received more than $2 million a year, whereas black schools received only about $350,000."
"Across the South, in the year after U.S. soldiers returned from France, seventy-six black men were lynched, some of them soldiers in uniforms. Six years after the welcome home of the Harlem Hellighters, the black 369th Infantry, which had served longer in uninterrupted combat than any other division (and whose regimental music had given Europeans their first exciting taste in jazz0, another army would parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.: thirty-five thousand white-robed members of the resurgent, viciously racist Ku Klux Klan."
"The situation was absurd-by law in Alabama white nurses could not care for black patiients. The plan was to have poorly paid black nurses' aides do the actual work of caring for the hospital's black patients while white nurses took home the high salaries."
"The Rosenwald Fund was no longer involved in 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service began the study that, by withholding treatment from 399 participants, became a notorious example of exploitation of the black community and disregard of ethical standards in medical research-the U.S. government issued a formal apology to surviving study participants in 1997."
"The $4.3 million that Julius Rosenwald contributed to the construction of these schoolhouses provided only 15 percent of their total price. 1922, for example, the school near Woodville, Virginia, cost a total of $3,225; of that $1,100 was raised by blacks in the community the school would serve, $125 from whites, $1,200 from public coffers, and $800 from Rosenwald."
"Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald have been criticized for acquiescing in the unfair dictates of the Jim Crow era-which, by building segregated schools, they did. Who knows what might have happened if each of them had used his enormous talents and influence to move vigorously make the argument for black voting rights, to focus attention on the horrors of lynching, or to push for integrated schools."
"They were ordinary people who, because of their race, had to possess extraordinary courage to achieve seemingly ordinary goals."
"...the conviction that there is dignity in work and meaning in service to others, that the best way to serve people is to give them tools to help themselves."
"Beginning in 1889, all the southern states rewrote their constitutions, creating various ways to keep blacks from exercising the voting rights they had been ensured by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments: literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, character assessment, grandfather clauses restructing voting to descendents of men who had voted three generations earlier, primaries for whites only, ballots that were deliberately made confusing."
"Slavery encouraged whites to blind themselves to the immorality of the arrangement that allowed many of them to grow rich and to think of their black slaves as intrinsically inferior. The excruciating upheaval of rebellion and war left the South humiliated and in ruins; it created feelings of guilt and resentment for many whites and economic devastation for members of both races."
"When he was asked what the greatest need was for black Americans, he always replied not rights or greater freedom but education. Rights, he said, mean little without the capacity to understand and make use of them. The first step up the ladder of self-improvement, inevitably, he felt, was education."
"Until we thus conquer urselves, I make no empty statement when I say that we shall have, especially in the Southern part of our country, a cancer growing at the heart of the Republic, that shall one day prove as dangerous as an attack from an army without or within."
"You cannot teach school in log cabins without doors, windows, lights, floor or apparatus. You need a schoolhouse and, if you are in earnest, the people will help you."
"She should not let her mind "dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other racial prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things. If one gets in the habit of continually thinking and talking about race prejudice, he soon gets to the point where he is fit for little that is worth doing."
"Rosenwald's willingness to overlook the YMCA's occasionally anti-Semitic practices was typical of his pragmatic approach and, perhaps, an indication of the fact that he himself had personally experienced very little prejudice."
"I feel a peculiar sympathy with a race that does not have a fair chance under the existing conditions of American life."
"We inherited no church houses since we became a free people-within forty five years we have erected 35,000 church buildings and in 90% of cases the money with which to erect these buildings has come out of our own pockets. And, Mr. Rosenwald, if you had not done anything else through this movement than to give the white people of this city of Chicago a chance to know the kind of colored people they have...it would have paid for itself."
"What to many blacks was a painful, even embarrasing reminder of bad times was to whites a stunningrevelation. The songs breathed life into their often scant knowledge of the South and of the black who lived there. The beauty and power of the singing could move them to tears."
"Washington explained that state goverments, maintaining two separate school systems, white and black, generally favored white schools, dividing the funds unevenly so that the black schools received very little. In Alabama, for example, where about half the children were black, white schools received more than $2 million a year, whereas black schools received only about $350,000."
"Across the South, in the year after U.S. soldiers returned from France, seventy-six black men were lynched, some of them soldiers in uniforms. Six years after the welcome home of the Harlem Hellighters, the black 369th Infantry, which had served longer in uninterrupted combat than any other division (and whose regimental music had given Europeans their first exciting taste in jazz0, another army would parade on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.: thirty-five thousand white-robed members of the resurgent, viciously racist Ku Klux Klan."
"The situation was absurd-by law in Alabama white nurses could not care for black patiients. The plan was to have poorly paid black nurses' aides do the actual work of caring for the hospital's black patients while white nurses took home the high salaries."
"The Rosenwald Fund was no longer involved in 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service began the study that, by withholding treatment from 399 participants, became a notorious example of exploitation of the black community and disregard of ethical standards in medical research-the U.S. government issued a formal apology to surviving study participants in 1997."
"The $4.3 million that Julius Rosenwald contributed to the construction of these schoolhouses provided only 15 percent of their total price. 1922, for example, the school near Woodville, Virginia, cost a total of $3,225; of that $1,100 was raised by blacks in the community the school would serve, $125 from whites, $1,200 from public coffers, and $800 from Rosenwald."
"Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald have been criticized for acquiescing in the unfair dictates of the Jim Crow era-which, by building segregated schools, they did. Who knows what might have happened if each of them had used his enormous talents and influence to move vigorously make the argument for black voting rights, to focus attention on the horrors of lynching, or to push for integrated schools."
"They were ordinary people who, because of their race, had to possess extraordinary courage to achieve seemingly ordinary goals."
"...the conviction that there is dignity in work and meaning in service to others, that the best way to serve people is to give them tools to help themselves."
August 10, 2014
If you like history and biographies, this is a good one. The author was able to pack a lot of information about Washington (Black) and Rosenwald (Jewish) into 200 pages and managed to keep it interesting.
Based on personal experience, most people do not know much about the history of a culture (or historic people within the culture) other than their own - and sometimes, not even their own. Books like this one are good as a "step outside of the box" to learn things of the past which helps in understanding the present.
Based on personal experience, most people do not know much about the history of a culture (or historic people within the culture) other than their own - and sometimes, not even their own. Books like this one are good as a "step outside of the box" to learn things of the past which helps in understanding the present.
September 14, 2014
The inspiring story of the partnership between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the extraordinarily generous and visionary philanthropist who helped build 5,000 schools for black children in every state of the segregated south.
March 1, 2019
Excellent book - I had no idea before reading this that the founder of Sears and Roebuck was instrumental in procuring hundreds of schools that were designed for success of the minority population, post-Civil War. Good reading!
April 10, 2021
Growing up in California, I was the oldest child in a "Sears family." My father was a Sears executive for 45 years (1956-2001); my mother worked for the company for 20. I worked for Sears both before and after my military service and eventually met my future wife on a freight elevator in the store. I vividly remember my father talking often of Mr. Julius Rosenwald, the "wizard of finance" behind the name of the company, the man who built Sears into one of the most successful American corporations of the 20th century. However, it was not until I read Stephanie Deutsch's You Need a Schoolhouse that I got to know and appreciate this great-hearted man who had such an influence on my family, as well as the realization of how much Jewish Americans contributed to the prosperity of Sears employees like my mother and father. This is a book very much worth reading. Today, I am an academic historian, so much of the story was familiar, and Deutsch's narrative gets a bit gossipy at times, which at times was frustrating. On the quite positive side of the ledger, though, are two valuable contributions set forth in this book. First, the author opens the readers' eyes to the horrors and travesties of anti-black discrimination and violence throughout America in the early 20th century. Histories tend to gloss over individual, localized events of mistreatment and murder and largely confine them to the Jim Crow South. But Booker T. Washington, his family, and all African Americans suffered "a thousand little cuts" on a regular basis, in the North as well as the South, and Deutsch capably reveals a portion of this, explaining it in a humane way to allow us to connect and empathize with the African American experience between the American Civil War and the 1930s. Second, and even more important, this book emphasizes how the civil rights movement (which of course well pre-dated the headline-catching events of the 1950s) was a true American people's movement--of individual men and women and children, mostly poor or working-class, mostly African American, stepping up and speaking out against discrimination, ignorance, injustice, and racism. Based on my studies, I believe that the author ought to have placed greater focus on the roles of black churches, which crucially served as places of sanctuary, education, and activism in the movement. But her overall point is well-taken and well-elucidated: the visible faces of the movement, like Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Robert Moses, were in actuality followers of the humble everyday, largely nameless folks who were committed to waking this nation up to its true mission and heritage: all women and men were created equal and endowed by God with the liberty-based rights that belong to every member of the human race.
January 22, 2022
This book is well researched although the prose is a bit tedious at times. It's a must read for anyone who wants to know more about African American history. This book completely changed my view of Booker T. Washington who was a complicated man. He and Julius Rosenwald formed a partnership that led to the building of over 5,000 schools for blacks in the South. It's an amazing story. And it's a "good read."
June 17, 2017
Outstanding! "You Need a Schoolhouse" tells the story of the partnership of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald and their project to build schoolhouses through the segregated south for African American children. In the end they built nearly 5,000 Rosenwald Schools through funds donated by Rosenwald and the local communities. An inspirational story! I couldn't recommend it enough!
March 6, 2020
I appreciated the biographical details about Washington — now I need to learn more. Rosenwald’s story is also interesting, mainly as to how he acquired his fortune.
July 18, 2020
What interesting men. The book was tedious towards then end but I really enjoyed learning about their life. Pretty incredible
November 29, 2018
A good overview of Rosenwald and Booker T Washington. I thought this book would have more about the rural school program than it did.
August 30, 2023
I was hoping for more about the schoolhouses and less about the biographies of Washington and Rosenwald.
March 25, 2012
I'd never heard of Julius Rosenwald or the Rosenwald schools. After reading this well-researched, tightly written book about how the philanthropist teamed up with helped finance 5,000 schools for African American children, I am surprised he is not as celebrated now as he was at the time of his death. ("Rosenwald Dead, Nation Mourn," said the front page of the New York Times). An impressive, moving-but-not-sappy, accounting of the building of the schools and man who rejected the politics of the times and followed his heart. A good year round read and an excellent way to teach beyond the expected during Black History month.
July 3, 2012
I have always been fascinated with the Rosenwald schools and this book tells how they came into existence.
November 16, 2015
Excellent
November 28, 2015
Inspiring story well told touches on the goodness of humanity, human rights, and the importance of education.
January 20, 2017
But seriously... amazing!
August 10, 2016
This book was interesting, but the end draged a little bit.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews