Before there was Samuel Mockbee and Rural Studio, there was Julius Rosenwald. In the early 1900s, Rosenwald oversaw a self-help construction program for schoolhouses in the rural South. By 1928, one out of every five schools in the region was what became popularly known as a Rosenwald School.
Rosenwald was not an architect. He was a tycoon, the man who turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. from a small Chicago-based mail-order house into the largest merchandiser in the country. Like many American tycoons, he was a philanthropist. The son of poor German-Jewish immigrants—his father was a peddler—Rosenwald had experienced anti-Semitism, and he was particularly sensitive to the plight of black Americans. After reading Up from Slavery, he sought out Booker T. Washington and became a major benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
The meeting of Rosenwald and Washington is a pivotal moment in a new documentary, released this summer, by the Washington, D.C.–based filmmaker Aviva Kempner, whose work includes Partisans of Vilna (1986) and the Emmy-nominated The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998). Rosenwald, which premiered at New York City’s Center for Jewish History and was screened at the NAACP’s recent national convention in Philadelphia, is a Horatio Alger story of accomplishment, practical idealism, vile segregation, and self-help construction.
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