Julius Rosenwald

There was a time when probably every American household had a thick, colorful Sears, Roebuck & Company catalog in the home. For children, it was a source of endless entertainment just flipping through the pages and dreaming of owning the latest toys. Rosenwald's business acumen made him an exceedingly wealthy man. His fortune did not just serve him. Rosenwald possessed a keen ethic of care for others, especially in education. In his lifetime, he, in partnership with Booker T. Washington and Black communities, was the force behind the construction of over five thousand schools for Black Americans across many southern states where education was denied and unquestionably inferior, lacking funding and essential educational resources. The importance of these schools cannot be overstated. Maya Angelou, writer and poet; John Lewis, U.S. Congressman, Civil Rights activist, and Freedom Rider; Medgar Evers, activist and first field secretary for NAACP; and, Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine Black students and the first female to graduate from Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, AR. Rosenwald was a true visionary and selfless change agent. His Rosenwald Fellowship Fund supported too many Black scholars and creatives to list here. But try to imagine America without these amazing human beings: James Baldwin, writer; Gordon Parks, photographer/documentarian; Marian Anderson, opera singer; Pauli Murray, lawyer, activist, and Episcopal priest; John Hope Franklin, American historian; Charles Drew, Surgeon; W.E.B DuBois intellectual, social scientist; Langston Hughes, poet, and writer; and, Zora Neale Hurston, writer and anthropologist. They were among the many who received a Rosenwald Fellowship. Julius Rosenwald’s extraordinary investments in the education of African American children and his support for including talented, scholars, artists, and legal minds went far in valuing the voices and contributions of Black Americans.