WILMINGTON — There’s a difference between integration and desegregation, Michael Williams explained during a phone conversation last week. He was speaking about…
Julius Rosenwald, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Germany, turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into America’s largest retailer. Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, created the Tuskegee Institute and led the college for more than 30 years.
Their groundbreaking partnership in the early decades of the 20th century led to a transformative initiative: the creation of 4,978 schools for African American children in 15 Southern and border states.
The program reshaped America. Economists at the Federal Reserve said the Rosenwald Schools were the most significant factor in the narrowing of the South’s racial education gap between World War I and II. Further, they were a meaningful force in the rise of the civil rights movement. Educating Blacks helped belie the canard that African Americans were intellectually inferior and many of the leaders and foot soldiers of the movement attended Rosenwald schools.
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