Begun at Tuskegee in 1912, the Rosenwald Fund was the product of an alliance between Booker T. Washington, President and Founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and Julius Rosenwald, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. Washington explained to Rosenwald that Black students in the South were attending school in constructed, badly one-room buildings, and that he could do much to help improve these learning environments.

Through the 1910s to 1932, the fund gave grants to Black communities to cover about a third of the cost of a school building. Communities were expected to match the Rosenwald money with either cash or in-kind contributions of labor and materials, and to gain financial support from the public school system. By the end of the1910s, several states surrounding Alabama had a few Rosenwald schools, but during the 1920s, the Rosenwald Fund, now headquartered in Nashville, TN became increasingly standardized and efficient, approving thousands of grants in all the southern states. By 1922, the Rosenwald Fund reported that one hundred and forty-one Rosenwald schools had been built in Mississippi, including fifty-eight three-teacher schools and five houses for teachers. 

When the Fund stopped giving building grants in 1932 due to losses from the stock market crash of 1929, Mississippi had received funding for 557 school campuses, including school buildings, vocational buildings, and teachers' houses. Out of that number, only a relative handful are known to survive, and none of the seven (or eight) Rosenwald schools in Monroe County are still standing.

We are working on a permanent exhibition to showcase the history of each Rosenwald school in Monroe County. We would like to include your help. 

• Participate in interviews to share your stories at a Rosenwald school

• Donate diploma or permit scanning of diploma

• School papers

• Obituaries of former teachers and students

• Old school paraphrenia (e.g., furniture)

• Contact information for former teachers or students (Please ask them in advance to share their information)

• Join Facebook group