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.
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