cover image You Need a Schoolhouse: 
Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South

You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South

Stephanie Deutsch. Northwestern Univ, $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8101-2790-6

Between 1913 and 1932, the Rosenwald Fund provided seed money for the construction of nearly 5,000 schools to serve the neglected educational needs of rural black schoolchildren throughout the South. Although the bulk of the money came from state governments and almost $6 million “came from donations from local—and poor—people,” Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932) was the indispensable prime mover, in concert with Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). In this dual biography, Deutsch (editor for Capitol Hill) tells alternately their separate lives; Rosenwald creates Sears, Roebuck stores and Washington builds the Tuskegee Institute. Meeting first in 1911, their institutional lives merged as Rosenwald served on the board of directors of Tuskegee. With Washington’s death, not only was the future of Tuskegee unsettled but so was the plan to build schoolhouses—but the philanthropy and involvement of the fund supported both. Deutsch’s portrait of these two powerful men with a close, but far from familiar, connection, is somewhat colorless in tone, a reflection perhaps of a social and racial divide they could not obliterate. Although the final chapter takes us to the schoolhouses, missing from this tribute to both men is a more vivid sense of the schools themselves—what exactly it was that made the “Rosenwald schools,” as they were called, such meaningful places. (Dec.)