Rosenwald Fund

Rosenwald Fund

The Rosenwald Fund (also known as the Rosenwald Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation) was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind."

Julius Rosenwald, an American clothier, became part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, and eventually served as its president from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its Board of Directors until his death in 1932. He became interested in social issues, especially education for African Americans, and provided funding through Dr. Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now known as Tuskegee University), a historically black college (HBCU), prior to founding the fund.

Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, the Rosenwald Fund was designed to expend all of its funds for philanthropic purposes before a predetermined "sunset date." It donated over $70 million to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities, and black institutions before funds were completely depleted in 1948.

The rural school building program for African-American children was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund. Over $4.4 million in matching funds stimulated construction of more than 5,000 one-room schools (and larger ones), as well as shops and teachers' homes, mostly in the South. These schools, constructed to models by architects of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now known as Tuskegee University), became known as "Rosenwald Schools." In some communities, surviving structures have been preserved and recognized as landmarks for their historical character and social significance.

One of the greatest contributions of the Rosenwald Fund was a series of grants it made to African American artists, writers, researchers and intellectuals between 1928 and 1948. Civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose father received a Rosenwald fellowship, has called the list of grantees a "Who's Who of black America in the 1930s and 1940s." Hundreds of grants were disbursed to such luminaries as Gordon Parks Jr., Elizabeth Catlett, Claude McKay, Dr. Charles Drew, Augusta Savage, Katherine Dunham, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. Fellowships of around $1,000 to $2,000 were given out yearly to applicants and were usually designed to be open-ended, requesting but not requiring grantees to report back on what they accomplished with the support.

In 1929, the Rosenwald Fund funded a syphilis treatment pilot program in five Southern states that preceded the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Unlike the later, non-therapeutic, study, the emphasis was on locating people with syphilis and treating them, during a time when syphilis was prevalent in poor African-American communities. The Fund ended its involvement in 1932, due to lack of matching state funds (a typical requirement in the Fund's endeavors). The federally-funded Tuskegee syphilis experiment began later that year.