by Cieslafdn | Feb 11, 2014 | Film Production, Rosenwald Screenings
The Historical Society of Washington D.C. presents “Visionaries of Early Black Education and Basketball: Julius Rosenwald and Dr. Edwin B. Henderson,” a special Black History Month event that will take place at the historic Carnegie Library (801 K Street NW) on Thursday, February 20th from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. A full flier (PDF format) is available here.
The evening promises a fascinating glimpse of the origins of basketball in the District. After Julius Rosenwald collaborated with Washington’s African American community to build a YMCA, Dr. Edwin B. Henderson (an influential physical educator) organized the new Y’s first basketball team. Henderson, who earned the moniker “the grandfather of black basketball,” is just one of the basketball greats connected with the YMCA: as we learned in an interview with Norris Dodson a year ago, John Thompson, Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing also graced its walls.
The 12th Street YMCA, Washington, D.C.
Photo credit: Michael Rose, March, 2012
We wrote about how Rosenwald came to support D.C.’s storied 12th Street YMCA in a previous blog post, and we have since shot interviews in the historic structure with local preservationists Lori Dodson and Norris Dodson. The modern building, built for the black residents of Washington, was the first of 24 YMCAs that Rosenwald supported with challenge grants between 1911 and 1933.
The program is co-sponsored by The Ciesla Foundation, the D.C. Basketball Institute, and the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Get your tickets today ($10/HSW member; $15 non-member)!
Featured films clips include:
- The Rosenwald Schools, a work in progress produced by Aviva Kempner
- Basketball, More than a Game: the Story of Dr. Edwin B. Henderson, a short film produced by Beverly Lindsey-Johnson
- Supreme Courts: How Washington DC Basketball Changed The World, trailer produced by Pennington Greene, John Ershek and Bijan C. Bayne
Panelists will include:
Moderated by: Bijan Bayne, author, Elgin Baylor: The First Superstar
by Cieslafdn | Jan 31, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
The Washington Post reports that Marian Anderson, one of the most notable of the long list of Rosenwald fellows, will soon be honored with a tribute concert at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. Anderson famously performed a concert on the National Mall in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her request to perform at the segregated Constitution Hall, which at the time accepted only white performers.
The upcoming event (“Of Thee We Sing”) will be held on April 12 of this year and will feature soprano Jessye Norman, WPAS’s Men and Women of the Gospel, soloist Solomon Howard and others.
Marian Anderson in 1947
Photo credit: Carl Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress
In March of last year, we wrote about Marian Anderson’s 1930 Rosenwald fellowship, which she used to make two trips to Europe. These early trips to Europe developed her international reputation as a top flight contralto at a time when African American singers struggled to find acceptance at major concert venues in the U.S.
You can read more about the tribute concert at The Washington Post.
by Cieslafdn | Jan 23, 2014 | School Restorations
The Rosenwald Fund supported the construction of over 500 schools in Texas, placing the state in the upper echelon of those that participated in the school-building program. Only North Carolina and Mississippi built more schools with Rosenwald funding. Given the significant impact these schools have had on the history of Texas communities and on generations of students, it is unfortunate that this history is not better known and that, today, there are only 10-15 Rosenwald Schools still standing in the state. Click the map below to be taken to a Google Map of known Rosenwald Schools in Texas.
Although Texas Rosenwald Schools that have been remodeled (such as the Pleasant Hill Rosenwald School in Linden) offer a plethora of fascinating stories, even among those schools that have been lost to time there are stories worth telling. One such example is the Hempstead School in Waller County, also known as the Sam Schwarz School. Built in 1928 at a cost of $20,200 with room for eight teachers, this was one of the largest Rosenwald Schools in the state. During school consolidation and desegregation, the original Sam Schwarz School was razed along with many of the historical materials it contained. The destruction of the Sam Schwarz School may have suppressed some of the bad memories of school segregation, but its loss affected the community deeply and its history can be used as a way to teach a new generation about the painful legacy of segregation.
Like other Rosenwald Schools, the Sam Schwarz School was built under a combination of funding from the Rosenwald Fund and local residents. The school’s namesake comes from a prominent Jewish family in Hempstead that was instrumental in its construction. Born in Prussia in the mid-1800s, the Schwarz brothers moved one by one to Hempstead, where they became local leaders in a burgeoning Jewish community. Sam Schwarz, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, kept the largest general store in the city and his brother Chayim was the rabbi for Hempstead’s only Jewish congregation (which bore his name). Together, the men built the city’s first synagogue.
Before the Rosenwald Fund’s school-building program, Hempstead’s school for African Americans was substandard and built in a low-lying area known as the “frog pond.” In the 1920s, Hempstead, like many communities, moved to leverage one of the Rosenwald Fund’s “challenge grants” to fundraise for a new, modern school. In addition to his other roles in the community, Sam Schwarz was a charter member of the local school board. Although Schwarz passed away in 1918, his daughters donated some family land located on higher ground in the city as the site for the new Rosenwald School. In honor of Schwarz’s legacy as a community leader and philanthropist, the school was named for him. In fact, even after the original Rosenwald School was replaced in the 1950s, the new building still bore Schwarz’s name, a testament to his enduring legacy of education and community uplift.
The Hempstead Rosenwald School (The Sam Schwarz School)
Photo courtesy of Fisk University’s Rosenwald School Database
The intersection between the Rosenwald Fund and the Schwarz family of Texas goes beyond their combined efforts in Hempstead. Like Sam Schwarz, Julius Rosenwald’s lineage can be traced back to Prussia. Also like the Schwarz family, Julius Rosenwald’s father Samuel settled west of the Appalachians, in Springfield, Illinois, where he too helped establish the city’s first synagogue. The Rosenwald Schools will portray the experience of Rosenwald’s father, Samuel, as an immigrant from small town in Prussia who made a new life in the American Midwest. By looking for opportunity in the wide-open spaces of Texas, the Schwarz family shares with the Rosenwalds this lesser known version of the Jewish immigrant experience in America.
Samuel Rosenwald
Image courtesy of Fred Fields
Because Texas is home to so many Rosenwald Schools as well as a Rosenwald-funded African American YMCA and a historical Sears distribution plant, the state will certainly have a prominent place in our film.
by Cieslafdn | Jan 6, 2014 | School Restorations
The Calvert Colored School, a C-shaped, red-brick building with an auditorium and stage, opened in 1929 for children in 1st through 11th grade. Previously “most black children attended elementary grades in the ‘plantation’ schools and only attended to the 8th grade at most,” according to the Tour Guide of Historic Calvert. The Calvert Colored School’s first principal, W.D. Spigner (spy-g-ner), inspired the local African American community and convinced the school board to make improvements such as indoor plumbing in 1948, the addition of a 12th grade class in the early 1950s, and a gymnasium in 1957. As annual enrollment climbed to 375, around half the senior class went on to college, often at historically black Texas colleges such as Prairie View A&M and Huston-Tillotson University. The school’s most famous former student is Tom Bradley, who was elected mayor of Los Angeles.
The Calvert Colored School, now a multi-purpose center in Calvert, Texas
Photo credit: Hollace Ava Weiner, 1/14
The school building became an elementary in the 1970s and was renamed W.D. Spigner Elementary, in honor of its longtime principal. In 2010, the school closed due to declining enrollment city wide. The school district gave the land and the building to the Calvert Colored W.D. Spigner Alumni Association Inc., which is based in Dallas and is turning it into a multi-purpose center. The association holds its quarterly board meetings and annual reunions on the premises.
James Whitaker, Calvert Class of ’56, president of the alumni association
Photo credit: Hollace Ava Weiner, 1/14
Alumni president James Whitaker, Class of ’56, recalled that all of his school teachers lived in the surrounding neighborhood and knew each child’s family. “The teachers were committed. They expected more,” he said. “Today’s students feel their teachers are not committed. Ours kept the bar high.” He reminisced about helping the janitor shovel coal. “Every room had a heater. Around 1950 they put in gas, which was lousy!” Whitaker didn’t realize how good an education he got at Calvert until he entered the military and began comparing himself to other young men from around the nation.
Detail from the Calvert School
Photo credit: Hollace Ava Weiner, 1/14
By Hollace Ava Weiner
by Cieslafdn | Dec 24, 2013 | Film Production
I just got back from a wonderful shoot in Valdosta, Georgia.
Barney Rosenwald School
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, December, 2013
The Valdosta, Georgia area was home to at least two Rosenwald Schools. After the Morven Rosenwald School was demolished, alumni of both Morven and the Barney Rosenwald School, joined together to restore the Barney School. While in Valdosta, I interviewed seven of these local residents who graduated from the schools and who are working together to save Barney from decay: Barbara and Gerald Golden, Delois Baker, Evelyn Morrison, Jerry Gilbert, Jonathan Smallwood and Lillie Pearl Thompson. Many thanks to our Valdosta interviewees for sharing their stories! Special thanks to the Goldens and the others for their hard work in bringing the school back to life and the warm memories of being educated there. I am especially grateful to the Goldens for making all the arrangements for me to film.
Aviva Kempner with Gerald Golden
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, December, 2013
I also conducted an interview with Alfred Perkins, author of Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy, and American Race Relations, who was gracious enough to travel to southern Georgia from his home in Florida in order to meet me. In his interview, Perkins did a great job bridging the gap between the two most salient Rosenwald Fund projects, the school-building program and the fellowship program. The Fund’s decision in the late 1920s to discontinue the school-building program was due to new Fund president Edwin Embree and Julius Rosenwald’s shared belief that the program had run its course as a demonstration of what the states could be doing for rural black education. From then on, it would be up to state governments to provide educational facilities for their residents, while the Rosenwald Fund could devote its efforts to improving education itself and to a magnanimous grant program for budding artists, writers and scholars.
It was not that all the needs had been met, but that Embree’s understanding of foundation work was to start the ball rolling, so to speak, to get an innovation well-established, but not to continue to fund it. In the case of the school-building program, the key purpose was to change the consciousness of public officials in the South so that they recognized that they had an obligation to provide adequate education for all the citizens, including the black population of the South.
Perkins also related the story of the very first Rosenwald grant recipient: James Weldon Johnson, who also wrote the “Negro National Anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” After lobbying for increased pay for South Carolina teachers, Embree planned a new project with the then head of the NAACP, Johnson. Some people may think Johnson received the first Rosenwald grant as a kind of reward for his role in the formation of the program, but Perkins argued that it was more due to two other reasons:
Having such a prestigious person receive the award gave it a kind of luster that otherwise it might not have had from the outset. The other consideration is that Mr. Johnson had some quite elaborate projects in mind to carry out. He used that period to write the first history of Harlem. He had in mind creating a kind of oratorio based on God’s Trombones. He wanted to write [and publish] some poems and there were several others significant projects that recommended him as the first recipient of an award.
Alfred Perkins, Edwin Embree’s biographer
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, December, 2013
Perkins described the purpose of the Rosenwald Fund fellowship program like this:
There were many creative talents within the black community that were not fully developed, and what was needed for those talents was an opportunity to devote full-time for a year or so to writing a book or doing a series of paintings or completing sculptures. That was the genesis of the Rosenwald program.
Indeed, while heading the Rosenwald Fund, Embree was driven to raise the ceiling for black achievement, taking a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the “talented tenth.” Along with the fellowship program, Embree engineered a deal with University of Chicago that led to the hiring of Allison Davis, the first black faculty member at a historically white university. Likewise, Embree convinced Harold Ickes (Secretary of the Interior under Franklin Roosevelt) to take on a staff member to act as a liaison for the African American community and the White House, with the Rosenwald Fund paying his salary. Although the first man to take this position, Clark Foreman, was white, he was quickly replaced with Robert C. Weaver, an African American economist. Under Embree’s guidance, the Rosenwald Fund successfully pushed for the development of a “black cabinet” during FDR’s administration.
The Rosenwald Fund under Embree became a great supporter of higher education for African Americans. Perhaps most importantly, Embree engineered the formation of Dillard University, the first major black institution of higher education in New Orleans, through the consolidation of the two smaller schools. In its early years, Dillard was staffed and administrated mainly by Rosenwald Fund figures like Horace Mann Bond, Will Alexander and Edgar Stern (son-in-law of Julius Rosenwald). In the Fund’s later years, it became more difficult to give direct financial support to black higher education, but Embree’s creativity and energy continued to show through. Unable to send money directly to Tuskegee Institute to build Moton Field (the airfield where the famous Tuskegee Airmen trained) Embree brokered a loan to the college from the Rosenwald Fund that allowed the airfield to be built.
Along with Johnson, Perkins also talked about the very last Rosenwald fellow: Pearl Primus, a dancer and anthropologist who was born in Trinidad. Ms. Primus performed at the June 4th, 1948 closing ceremony for the Rosenwald Fund at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago. Although she had been turned down for a Rosenwald grant in the past, Perkins explained that “her performance was so captivating on this occasion that after the ceremony, the selection committee met again and decided to award her a Rosenwald fellowship – the last one.”
Primus used her grant to study dance in Africa. She received a $4,000 grant (one of the largest given by the Rosenwald fellowship program) and departed in December of 1948. Typical of the open-ended nature of Rosenwald grants, she told the New York Amsterdam News that her only assignment had been to “go to the parts of Africa where I could find material not only to enrich our theatre but to add to our knowledge of people little understood.” In addition to enriching Primus’s dancing skills, her research of African indigenous dance styles made her a pioneering dance scholar. She shared her discoveries during her trip via dispatches to American newspapers (like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American) and later, with her many students over the years after she became a university instructor.
Update: December 24, 2013. Clarification of Ickes’ first Rosenwald-funded black staff member, Robert C. Weaver.
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