Julius Rosenwalds Legacy on Race Relations

Julius Rosenwald was an early pioneer in the struggle for black
equality.

He was also a very rich and powerful capitolist with a great since of
justice and hope for African Americans.


Julius Rosenwald was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist.

He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for the Rosenwald Fund which donated millions to support the education of African Americans and other worthy causes in the first half of the 20th century.

Julius Rosenwald was born to clothier Samuel Rosenwald and his wife Augusta Hammerslough Rosenwald, a Jewish immigrant family from Germany. He was born and raised just a few blocks from the Abraham Lincoln residence in Springfield, Illinois during Lincoln's presidency of the United States.

After the 1906 financial reorganization of Sears, Rosenwald became friends with Goldman Sachs's other senior partner, Paul Sachs. Sachs often stayed with Rosenwald during his many trips to Chicago and the two would discuss America's social situation, agreeing that the plight of African Americans was the most serious in the US. Sachs introduced Rosenwald to two promoters of African American education, William H. Baldwin and Booker T. Washington.

Rosenwald made common cause with Washington and was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of the Tuskegee Institute in 1912, a position he also held for the remainder of his life.

He also endowed the Institute so that Washington could spend less time on the road seeking funding and devote more time towards management of the Institute.

Dr. Washington encouraged Rosenwald to address the poor state of African American education in the US, and he responded by providing funds for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914, and overseen by Tuskegee. Built by and for African Americans, the project foreshadowed the role in education Julius Rosenwald would play. Inspired by the social progressivism of Jane Addams, Minnie Low, Grace Abbott, Paul Sachs, and Booker T. Washington and the Reform Judaism of Emil Hirsch and Julian Mack (many of whom were his personal friends as well), Rosenwald devoted his time, energy, and money towards philanthropy. In his words, written in 1911:

"The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer."

His Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 for "the well-being of mankind." Unlike other endowed foundations, which were designed to fund themselves in perpetuity, The Rosenwald Fund was intended to use all of its funds for philanthropic purposes. In doing so, the fund was completely spent by 1948.

Over the course of his life, Rosenwald and his fund donated over 70 million dollars to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities and black institutions. The school building program was one of the largest programs administered by the Rosenwald Fund, contributing over four million dollars in matching funds to the construction of over five thousand schools, shops, and teachers' homes in the south. These schools became known as "Rosenwald Schools."

He gave $1000 grants to the first 100 counties in the U.S. to hire County Extension Agents, helping the US Department of Agriculture launch a program that was very valuable to rural Americans. He was also the principal founder and backer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, to which he gave over five million dollars and served as the President (1927-1932).

Rosenwald died at his home in the Ravinia section of Highland Park, Illinois, on January 6, 1932.