Dear Visitor,
Please see the new article about the historians, preservationists and former students working to save the remaining Rosenwald Schools across the South.
The story is a fascinating piece of history about the partnership of two men, Booker T. Washington and millionaire Julius Rosenwald, who teamed up in the early 1900s and started one of the most ambitious school building programs in the nation. The story is largely unknown to newer generations, but is worthy of sharing.
The press release on the conference is here.
Below is an excerpt from the long-form article at Birmingham View Online:
When Dorothy Walker found the building on Miles College’s campus in Birmingham, she turned to her intrepid co-explorer, giddy as a gold prospector.
Matching it with a picture from a Fisk University database, she confirmed that the Miles College resource center was in fact a Rosenwald School. It is one of the few remaining testaments to an ambitious and far-reaching school building project in American and African American history.
“I can’t begin to put into words how excited we were when we came to this building and matched it,” Walker, a preservationist with the Alabama Historical Commission, said of the day she first personally found a Rosenwald School in Alabama. She’d been looking for it with Birmingham Public Library Archivist Jim Baggett. “We were both so elated. It was like finding lost treasure!”
However, the significance of their find was lost on the people still using the building.
That is what the organizers of this week’s conference at Tuskegee University hope to change.
“100 Years of Pride, Progress & Preservation: The National Rosenwald Schools Conference” is a major, 10-year initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation to find and save remaining Rosenwald School buildings that were once the pride and community hub of African American communities across the South. Through their own hard work and sacrifice, impoverished blacks leveraged a millionaire philanthropist’s gift to construct thousands of schools and build the best education system they could for their children, despite the brutal hardships of a deeply unfair and unequal society.
Acclaimed poet and author Nikki Giovanni will provide the conference’s closing keynote address.
“This conference provides an opportunity for Rosenwald School alumni and preservationists to share their rich and varied stories, network with each other, and learn more through educational workshops, documentary films, tours and poster presentations to preserve this important part of our nation’s story,” says John Hildreth, vice president of Eastern Field Services for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Read the Full Story Online . . .
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