November 12, 2025
Fisk University has launched a digital archive showcasing the Rosenwald Fund’s impact on Black education in the Jim Crow South.
Fisk University has unveiled a digital portal of archived materials showcasing the Rosenwald Fund’s impact on Black education and community institutions in the South.
Launched on Nov. 5, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archive database offers over 146,000 digitized items, including photographs, letters, fellowship applications, and building plans for Rosenwald Schools that educated the likes of Maya Angelou, Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Lewis, the Nashville Banner reports.
The collection highlights the Fund’s enduring impact on Black communities throughout the Jim Crow South during a period of significant educational inequality.
Project staff hosted a virtual unveiling, offering an online tour of the archive. Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, dean emerita of the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk, was inspired to launch the database after exploring Fisk’s collection and realizing she had attended a Rosenwald School as a child in the 1930s.
“In looking around at the materials in the library, I saw photos of schools, and some of them needed to be filed,” Smith recalled. “And I asked our special collections librarian, ‘What are these schools, why are they here?’”
Rosenwald, a Jewish businessman from Chicago, partnered with Booker T. Washington, who was seeking a new board member for the Tuskegee Institute. Deeply moved after reading Washington’s autobiography, Rosenwald needed no convincing when Washington encouraged him to invest in Black education.
Their efforts led to the construction of 5,000 schools across the Southeast, as well as homes for their teachers, designed to provide quality education in well-built facilities. Rosenwald remained on Tuskegee Institute’s board for the rest of his life.
Most Rosenwald schools closed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the push for desegregation. Some remained open during the transition or were repurposed as community centers. The last surviving Rosenwald school in Davidson County is the Pasquo School, now a private residence and listed as an endangered historic site in Nashville in 2019. Several other Rosenwald-supported buildings, including the Wabash Avenue YMCA in Chicago, also remain standing and have been recognized as historic landmarks.
“It’s just a great experience to know the history,” said Esther McShepard, who works at Franklin Library in Nashville and attended a Rosenwald School in 1950. “You don’t know that all these other schools around and all the other different communities, and they are going through the same thing in education.”
RELATED CONTENT: Fisk University Ends Its Historic Gymnastics Program
