Part two of a multi-part series on black education in early 20^th century Baldwin County

In Baldwin County, and throughout the South for that matter, education opportunities for black students made important strides after 1900 with the assistance of northern philanthropists like Anna T. Jeanes and Julius Rosenwald and through the efforts of southern educators like Booker T. Washington.

Across the southern United States, especially in the late 19^th century, the education systems suffered from a shortfall of funding and a lack of enthusiasm, most particularly when it came to the education of minorities.

As early as the 1910s, Julius Rosenwald teamed with Booker T. Washington to devise a system where local contributions combined with philanthropic donation to construct facilities in which young black students could obtain an education. The two men worked together to energize the local black community through the promise of a matching grant that was one part local contribution and one part money supplied by the Rosenwald trust. This cooperative effort also involved the local school board, which then had to agree to operate the school once it was built.

While Washington and Rosenwald agreed on the future of black education in America, they could not have risen from more dissimilar backgrounds. Washington was born in Virginia in 1856 as a slave. As such, he performed a variety of duties on a plantation owned by James Burroughs until the end of the Civil War, when he and his mother moved to West Virginia.

There he began work in a salt mine and learned to read and write on his own and with the help of his mother. Washington later traveled by foot to Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia, where he worked as a janitor to pay for his tuition. He graduated from Hampton in 1875, after which he taught school in his home town in West Virginia.

In 1881, money was appropriated by the State of Alabama to create a school for black students, which became the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Washington became the head of the school and expanded it to become a national leader in education.

Julius Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Ill. in 1862. At an early age, he was apprenticed to an uncle in New York City to learn the clothing business. He and a brother soon moved to Chicago to bring their clothing line, which was based on standardized sizing, to the heart of rural America. It was in Chicago that Rosenwald went into business with Richard Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck of Sears, Roebuck and Co. He helped expand their line of goods, for which he became enormously wealthy.

By the 1910s, Rosenwald sought an outlet for his wealth as a means of giving back to the community. Rosenwald and Washington worked out the plan to involve rural black communities, white school boards and the cash made available through the Rosenwald trust to improve the infrastructure for black education in the early 20^th century.

Rosenwald’s fund contributed millions of dollars in conjunction with local matching funds to build more than 5,000 rural schools, which became known as Rosenwald schools. There were once 14 Rosenwald schools in Baldwin County, and these schools provided an educational opportunity for the area’s black students prior to integration in the 1960s. The Rosenwald fund was completely exhausted by the late 1940s; nevertheless, the structures created from that philanthropic effort have had a lasting effect.