November 12, 2025
Fisk College has launched a digital archive showcasing the Rosenwald Fund’s influence on Black training within the Jim Crow South.
Fisk College has unveiled a digital portal of archived supplies showcasing the Rosenwald Fund’s influence on Black training and group establishments within the South.
Launched on Nov. 5, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archive database presents over 146,000 digitized gadgets, together with pictures, letters, fellowship purposes, and constructing plans for Rosenwald Colleges that educated the likes of Maya Angelou, Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Lewis, the Nashville Banner studies.
The gathering highlights the Fund’s enduring influence on Black communities all through the Jim Crow South throughout a interval of great instructional inequality.
Mission employees hosted a digital unveiling, providing an internet tour of the archive. Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, dean emerita of the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk, was impressed to launch the database after exploring Fisk’s assortment and realizing she had attended a Rosenwald Faculty as a toddler within the Nineteen Thirties.
“In wanting round on the supplies within the library, I noticed pictures of colleges, and a few of them wanted to be filed,” Smith recalled. “And I requested our particular collections librarian, ‘What are these faculties, why are they right here?’”
Rosenwald, a Jewish businessman from Chicago, partnered with Booker T. Washington, who was searching for a brand new board member for the Tuskegee Institute. Deeply moved after studying Washington’s autobiography, Rosenwald wanted no convincing when Washington inspired him to put money into Black training.
Their efforts led to the development of 5,000 faculties throughout the Southeast, in addition to properties for his or her academics, designed to offer high quality training in well-built services. Rosenwald remained on Tuskegee Institute’s board for the remainder of his life.
Most Rosenwald faculties closed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Schooling determination and the push for desegregation. Some remained open in the course of the transition or had been repurposed as group facilities. The final surviving Rosenwald college in Davidson County is the Pasquo Faculty, now a non-public residence and listed as an endangered historic website in Nashville in 2019. A number of different Rosenwald-supported buildings, together with the Wabash Avenue YMCA in Chicago, additionally stay standing and have been acknowledged as historic landmarks.
“It’s only a nice expertise to know the historical past,” stated Esther McShepard, who works at Franklin Library in Nashville and attended a Rosenwald Faculty in 1950. “You don’t know that each one these different faculties round and all the opposite totally different communities, and they’re going by way of the identical factor in training.”
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