Cooperative Living February 2021 - 17

CoverFocus | by Steven Johnson, Staff Writer
The Legacy of
Rosenwald Schools
A story of persistence and dedication
in Black education
B
lackie might have been the first
dog to be expelled from school.
Maxine Nowlin's pup was a
fixture curled up near the pot-bellied
stove that heated a two-room
schoolhouse in Courtland, Va., as a
teacher taught Black students.
Until someone, probably a teacher,
stepped on the dog one day. It growled,
bared its teeth and earned permanent
canine detention. " Blackie could not
go to school with us anymore, " Nowlin
says with a laugh decades later. " But
Blackie was a part of the educational
process. "
But until she attended a conference
about 10 years ago, Nowlin did not
realize that her classmates and Blackie
were learning in a Rosenwald school,
the gateway to Black education in the
South and an eventual entry on the
National Register of Historic Places.
" I had no earthly clue that it was a
Rosenwald school, " says Nowlin, a
member of Courtland Town Council
who runs an after-school program at
the school, now a community center.
" This is a fascinating part of history. "
A STEP FORWARD
The Courtland School,
which cost $4,000, with
the African American
community contributing
$1,000, was one of 5,300
Rosenwald schools built
between 1917 and 1932.
Booker T. Washington,
president of Tuskegee
Institute, supplied the
inspiration and Julius
Rosenwald, president of
Maxine Nowlin's brother, Maurice Darden,
is in this photograph of a classroom in the
original Rosenwald school in Courtland, Va.
Sears, Roebuck and Co. and a member
of Tuskegee's board of trustees,
supplied the financing, which local
citizens and governing bodies
had to match.
Rosenwald saw it " as an incentive
for Southern states to meet their
responsibility to provide decent public
schools for Black children, " according
to Mary Hoffschwelle, a professor at
Middle Tennessee State University and
expert on the schools declared
endangered in 2002 by the National
Trust for Historic Preservation.
Bureaus of freed slaves and churches
A 1916 photo shows teachers and agent of Rosenwald schools. Robert
Russa Morton, principal of Tuskegee Institute, is seated at center. A museum
in Farmville, Va., is named for him.
brought education to many communities
after the Civil War. But Rosenwald
schools were more sweeping in their
scope - Hoffschwelle estimates they
housed one-third of the South's rural
Black schoolchildren and teachers
by 1928.
" I don't think people understand
that education for emancipated Black
people's education was one of their top
priorities. They just wanted to be
educated and they wanted their
children educated, " says Sonja Ingram,
field services manager for Preservation
Virginia, a Richmond-based nonprofit.
" The Rosenwald fund was really a
shot in the arm to help with this. "
Preservation Virginia has been
painstakingly cataloguing Rosenwald
schools in the state, working with the
Virginia Department of Historic
Resources to identify where the schools
were and what happened to them.
Rosenwald schools have been located
in 86 of Virginia's 95 counties and four
independent cities.
The organization has developed an
interactive map, subject to refinement,
of the 382 school buildings in Virginia
attributable to the Rosenwald project.
Most have been demolished or fallen
(continued on page 16)
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February 2021 | Cooperative Living | 15
PHOTO COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
PHOTOS BY LAURA EMERY
http://www.co-opliving.com
Cooperative Living February 2021

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