Entry · catalog no. 2071
Rosenwald school
/ /ˈɹoʊzənwɔld skul/ /ROH-zen-wawld SKOOL
noun · Rural South, from Alabama and Georgia to Texas and Virginia · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
A school for Black children built in the early twentieth century with the help of the Rosenwald Fund and, above all, money, labor and land raised by the Black community itself.
“Grandmama learned to read at the Rosenwald school down the road.”
2.
By extension, a surviving school building of that kind, now often preserved as a landmark or community center.
“The old Rosenwald school is now the community center.”
Origin & Attribution
The program began in 1912 when Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute and Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered to build schools for Black children in the segregated South, where public money for them was scarce. Rosenwald's fund supplied matching grants, but Black families and churches raised much of the cost, often by selling food, donating land and building by hand. By 1932 about 5,000 schools had been built across fifteen states, and the term is still the community's name for those buildings.
1912
Washington and Rosenwald begin the school-building partnership
1932
The program ends after about 5,000 schools
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Rural South, from Alabama and Georgia to Texas and Virginia · 1910s
Spoken by
Black Southern communities, alumni and descendants; historians and preservationists
$ROSENWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical114 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1912
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
National Park Service, 'Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and Modernized Schools'
web
■
Library of Congress blog, 'If You Build It, They Will Learn,' 2013
web
■
+ Cite a sourceSouth Carolina Encyclopedia, 'Rosenwald Schools'
web
See also