New interviews for The Rosenwald Schools

by Cieslafdn | Nov 11, 2013 | Film Production

October brought three great new interviews to The Rosenwald Schools. Read on to get a preview of three D.C.-area residents who will appear in our film: a rabbi, a poet and a curator.

Rabbi David Saperstein

David Saperstein is a lawyer and rabbi, active for decades in the Union for Reform Judaism and on the board of trustees for the NAACP. In his interview, he described the way Julius Rosenwald’s philanthropy adheres to the rich tradition of social justice in Reform Judaism:

Jewish leaders and Rabbis have always spoken out in universal terms, in terms of our obligation to be God’s partners in shaping a better world. So it’s not surprising that Rosenwald was able to deal both internally with Jewish causes of social justice – helping the Jews from Eastern Europe, as one example – but also get involved in universal concerns, working with Jane Addams in Hull House, the NAACP and eventually building this extraordinary set of schools.

Aviva Kempner and David Saperstein
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, October 28, 2013

The first system of universal education, at least for boys, was derived by the rabbis at the beginning of the Common Era, during the Talmudic Era of Rabbinic Judaism, 2,000 years ago. Every Jewish boy, rich and poor alike, not only was entitled to be educated, but it was the obligation of the society to ensure that it would happen. The Talmud says “be sure to educate the children of the poor, for out of them will come our great rabbis.” This was a belief that has been part of the Jewish community for 2,000 years.

Julius Rosenwald, 1917
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection

When the abysmal lack of education for African Americans was brought to Rosenwald’s attention, the recognition that there couldn’t be equality without education transformed his life. And he did one of the most extraordinary acts of social justice in the history of humankind, single-handedly building this network of schools that transformed the history of America, and certainly of African Americans. One of the most extraordinary undertakings in all of human history on social justice [was] building this remarkable network of schools. It transformed the destiny of the African American community, and therefore of America.

E. Ethelbert Miller

E. Ethelbert Miller is a poet and activist living in Washington D.C. He is inspired by Hughes’s poetry and by his commitment to bringing it to new audiences.

Aviva Kempner with E. Ethelbert Miller
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, October 28, 2013

Hughes got two Rosenwald fellowships, in 1931 and in 1941. When he applied to the Rosenwald Fund for a second time, Miller explained, it was at a low point in his career. Having run out of money, he had been forced to sell the rights to his previous books to his publisher, Knopf, for just $400. The Rosenwald money was very timely for Hughes, as Miller pointed out:

Langston saved everything, down to receipts and stuff like that, so we can see he never had a lot of money. I think the worst thing to be is a writer and you have to lose the rights to your work. To me, it’s the equivalent of being like a great jazz musician and you have to pawn your horn. That’s the real part where you have to say, “Okay, how committed am I to this?”

Langston Hughes, 1936 (between his two Rosenwald grants)
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Carl Van Vechten Collection

In 1941, his major work had not even been done yet, [such as] his Montage of a Dream Deferred. A lot of his Simple stories had not been written. But you can see he was at that point where many of us maybe would have given up or lost the rights to our work, our stories. But you see why, when an award does come, it comes at a particular time, like that old TV show The Millionaire, where somebody knocks on your door and gives you this money. And not only are they giving you money, they’re giving you hope and they’re giving you the ability to continue to pursue your dreams.

Philip Brookman

Philip Brookman is the chief curator at Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. An expert on photography, Brookman knew Gordon Parks personally. On a Rosenwald fellowship in 1942, Parks moved from Chicago to Washington D.C. to shoot photos for the Farm Security Administration, quickly producing what would become perhaps his most iconic photograph, American Gothic.

Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (also known as “American Gothic”)
Photo credit: Gordon Parks, Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection

The story of Parks’ Rosenwald fellowship will be prominent in the film, but Brookman gave us a wide variety of other interesting information on Parks’ life that will be included in the DVD of the film. Brookman discussed the way Parks approached his subjects, a method that began with his very first series of photographs of Ella Watson.

Gordon got to know a lot of the people that he photographed very well. I think that’s one of the things that distinguishes his photography. He really had to know and understand the people he photographed.

Aviva Kempner with Philip Brookman
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, October 28, 2013

One of the people he photographed is Richard Wright. He made a portrait a little bit later that I think focuses on Wright’s face and it puts him in a very modern looking environment. Not an environment that one would think when representing an author who had written so much about coming up from poverty in difficult conditions. Gordon wanted to represent the artist who was Richard Wright and I think he was very good at understanding how to actually convey a sense of who people were. His friendship with Wright had initially inspired him to become a photographer and to represent with images the way that Wright represented with words the kind of experiences they both had had growing up.

Richard Wright, 1943
Photo credit: Gordon Parks, Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection

I think that it was this kind of sensibility that came out of the Rosenwald era that gave artists a way of understanding what the power of their work could be and what it would mean for the world.

New interviews for The Rosenwald Schools – D.C. Edition

by Cieslafdn | Sep 26, 2013 | Film Production

After filming in Tuskegee we’ve kept up the fast pace of The Rosenwald Schools production schedule by filming 8 more interviews right here in Washington. Read on for pics and interesting tidbits from the two days of interviews shot with two Congressmen, the president of the NAACP, two authors, and a Rosenwald relative, family friend and two fans of the great philanthropist.

Two Congressmen Interviewed

Our first stop on September 10th was the House of Representatives office buildings. After unpacking all of our equipment through the security scanner, we made our way to the office of Congressman John Lewis of Georgia. Mr. Lewis grew up in Alabama and attended the Dunn’s Chapel Elementary School, a Rosenwald School. While Mr. Lewis discussed his harrowing memories of living in the Jim Crow South, the thirst for education by he and his peers and, later, Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement, we found it interesting that both he and Representative Danny Davis remembered ordering from the Sears Roebuck catalogue as children. In fact, both men talked about ordering live chickens from the catalogue. Mr. Lewis had this to say about Sears:

As a child I remember my parents ordering things from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. This big, thick, heavy book. Some of us called it the ordering book and other of us called it the wish book. We would turn the pages and say “I wish I had this, I wish I had that.” And that book inspired me that I needed to get an education if I wanted certain things. I needed to be prepared; I needed to earn some money to be able to buy.

Aviva Kempner and Congressman John Lewis
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

After Congressman Lewis, we interviewed Congressman Danny Davis of Illinois, whose district includes several Rosenwald-related landmarks in Chicago. Illinois’s 7th Congressional District has within its borders the Rosenwald YMCA on South Wabash Avenue, the massive Sears campus that Rosenwald built on the West Side and the Rosenwald Apartments on the South Side. Mr. Davis mused that during his life he had crossed paths with Sears a remarkable number of times. As Davis put it, from ordering chickens out of the Sears catalogue as a child in Arkansas for a 4-H project, to working at the Sears store as a summer job when he first moved to Chicago, to keeping office space in the old Sears building early in his career as an Illinois Representative, it’s like Sears has been “a part of my life” since childhood. Coincidentally, Davis mentioned that he was about to see the Sears Holdings Associate Gospel Choir perform at a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on September 19th.

Aviva Kempner and Congressman Danny Davis
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

Davis described Sears as a center of Chicago’s North Lawndale community when he first moved to Chicago as a young man, both figuratively because of its large tower and sprawling campus and economically because so many people from the community. including himself, found work there in various capacities. As you might expect, Davis is also excited about the rehabilitation of a major landmark in another Chicago community, the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments:

It’s kind of a delight that a fellow like Julius Rosenwald saw [overcrowding in Chicago] back then and decided to do something about it in terms of the development of mixed income housing. When I hear people talk about having lived in the big development right on Michigan Avenue and 47th Street [The Rosenwald Apartments], and to know that right now plans are seriously underway for the redevelopment and revitalization of that structure- every time I run into the alderman of that area, Pat Dowell, we never miss having a conversation about it and she’s always smiling.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919

After Davis, we interviewed Gary Krist, who published City of Scoundrels in 2012, a crackling book about the summer of 1919 in Chicago, a tumultuous but formative time in the city’s history. Krist has written a couple of popular history books and he has a great talent for painting a picture of a fascinating moment in history that is not well-known outside of Chicago. Take his description of the beginning of the 1919 race riot:

Intense competition for jobs and housing was really creating a volatile situation between blacks and whites throughout 1919, and eventually on one of those classic 97 degree summer days, things just exploded. It started with a group of boys from the Black Belt who decided they wanted to go to the beach on this hot Sunday afternoon. They went to this place they called the hot and cold, because the icehouse on the shore released cold water and the brewery on the shore released hot water and it mixed in this place. This was located in a no man’s land between the 25th Street beach, which was called the African American answer to Atlantic City, and the 29th Street beach, which was a de facto white beach.

Beaches were not officially segregated in Chicago at this time, but they were unofficially segregated. It just so happened on this day, several couples, African American couples, had come to the 29th Street beach to forcibly integrate it. They encountered some hostility from the bathers; there was some rock throwing, some shoving. But it might have ended there, if not for these boys who had gotten their raft in the hot and cold and now had drifted down the coast into the waters off the 29th Street beach. A young white man on the shore started throwing rocks at them and unfortunately one of the rocks hit one of the boys and he slid off the raft and ultimately drowned. This proved to be the event that precipitated the violence. Police arrived, shots were fired. It spread throughout the entire south side, and over the next 5 days people were just brutally killing each other in the streets.

The main instigators were the so-called athletic clubs, which were groups of young, usually Irish, white boys, located in the neighborhoods just to the west of the south side. They had been spoiling for a fight all summer long, because of all of these tensions, so they started just arming themselves with knives, with brickbats, bricks, and going around attacking people. They would get into automobiles and drive down State Street and fire at people on the street. They would go to streetcars, climb on top and pull down the trolley assembly so that the streetcar would be immobilized, and then they would take out any black passengers in that car and beat them on the street.

Interestingly, this was one of the first American riots where black people actively fought back, and sometimes, in some instances, were the aggressors. Soon you had black snipers shooting at white rioters from rooftops and windows. Ultimately the scenes played out almost like the war scenes they had just seen in Europe [in World War I] because a lot of the soldiers were among the rioters. It was nightmarish 5 days in Chicago.

Gary Krist and Aviva Kempner
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

James Jones has written the definitive study of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (Bad Blood, 1993) so we were fortunate to be able to interview him about the Rosenwald Fund’s brief connection to a precursor study. When Edwin Embree took over as head of the Rosenwald Fund, he reoriented its scope somewhat to include more health-related initiatives, one of which was a syphilis treatment program. Because treatment for syphilis at the time was intense and prolonged and because of the inherent difficulties in serving a rural, impoverished population, many doctors had written off treating the African American community as a lost cause despite the shocking prevalence of the disease.

Aviva Kempner and James Jones
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

In 1929, Dr. Jones explained, the Rosenwald Fund organized a syphilis “control demonstration” that consisted of six targeted county treatment programs designed to demonstrate to unmotivated Southern healthcare officials the potential efficacy of syphilis treatment in the African American population. The demonstration was effective, but short-lived, as the Great Depression caused the Fund to withdraw its support prematurely. As Jones put it, while the Rosenwald Fund left the program with regrets because it hadn’t made enough progress combating syphilis in the African American community, the Fund “came out smelling like roses” in regards to the later, infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Unlike the Rosenwald Fund’s anti-syphilis endeavor, which was targeted towards immediate treatment of a suffering populace, the later federally-funded Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was non-therapeutic and actually withheld new effective treatments (e.g. penicillin) from its participants in order to study the long-term effects of the disease.

The Sterns

Julius Rosenwald must have been a great father, as it seems each of his children did something remarkable in their own lives to “repair the world,” whether through giving money or personal efforts to worthy causes. Edith Rosenwald, and her husband Edgar Stern, became notable philanthropists in their own right in New Orleans, helping to found Dillard and working to increase voting rights for African Americans. As The Rosenwald Schools is going to primarily be about the life of Rosenwald, stories about the Sterns will probably not play a big part, but they deserve to be better known. Fortunately, we were able to interview Cokie Roberts, who grew up as a family friend of the Sterns. Ms. Roberts spoke highly of the Sterns’ commitment to social justice, and it was fitting that we spoke to her on the anniversary of Edith Stern’s death in 1980. One of the stories Roberts related was about a meeting between 1930 Rosenwald fellow Marian Anderson and the Stern family:

One of [Edith’s] cooks told her that there was a wonderful singer at her church, and so Aunt Edith decided to go and hear the singer. In fact, she was a wonderful singer: her name was Marian Anderson and Aunt Edith decided to have her come to their home. This was 1932; this was really in the dark ages of black-white relations, particularly in a city like New Orleans. And so she decided to not only invite Marian Anderson to sing at her home but also to have her as the guest of honor. But truly that was not done, I mean really not done. Edgar Stern was a little concerned about it, as the story goes, he said to [Edith] “We could lose some friends over this.” And she said “Well then we’ll see who our friends are.”

Cokie Roberts and Aviva Kempner
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

Anderson’s concert at the Stern’s house apparently went over without major incident, but she continued to face discrimination in concert venues. Most people know the story of her being barred from singing at Constitution Hall (which lead to her iconic 1939 performance in front of the Lincoln Memorial) but it’s less well-known that when she was invited to sing in New Orleans’ Municipal Auditorium a year later, it was the first concert in that venue that allowed black patrons to attend. Even though there was a black singer on stage, the black concert-goers were limited to balcony seating, a segregated arrangement that lead to protests by the NAACP.

Rosenwald and the NAACP

On the topic of the NAACP, our next interviewee was Ben Jealous, current president of the Association. Jealous is an amazing source for the history of the NAACP and a great spokesman for its mission. In his interview, (in addition to discussing life in the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, “The Crisis” and even Marian Anderson) Jealous echoed some of the points made in the Ciesla Foundation’s recent symposium on the anniversary of the March on Washington.

The NAACP has always been a very black organization, [but] we have always been explicitly a multi-faith, multi-race organization from our very beginning. Jews were active in the NAACP because they were against the racism of the South, but they were also inspired by their fears of what was happening to their own community. And if that could happen to people here based on their color, well, given what was happening to be people based on their faith in Europe, what might happen here soon?

Ben Jealous
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

On a similarly inclusive note, Jealous cleared up a misconception about the origin of the NAACP’s name:

In fact, our name was changed very early on. We were named the National Negro Association in 1909. We became the NAACP in 1910, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. So what happened? Well, some people think that maybe between 1909 and 1910, the word for black people changed. Quite the contrary. At the time, “colored people” meant what people of color means today. It was a much broader category than “Negro,” which just meant black folks.

And so Du Bois comes into a meeting in 1910 and he says, “We have to change our name.” Think about how the other founders must have felt. “Our organization is a year old. We have to do a whole lot of things. One thing we don’t have to do is change our name.” But Du Bois walks in and says, “We’re not trying to simply promote black people; we’re not trying to replace white supremacy with black supremacy. We’re trying to equalize humanity; we’re trying to get everybody at the same level. We don’t want to push white people down; we just want to lift everybody else up.” And colored people in that case referred to the everybody else.

Other interviews

Other interviewees included David Deutsch and Debra and Joshua Levin. Deutsch is Julius Rosenwald’s great-grandson, but he was surprised to learn later in life that his grandmother Adele Rosenwald Levy, who he had spent Thanksgivings with as a child, was a remarkable philanthropist and art collector who had the foresight in 1941 to acquire Jacob Lawrence’s amazing Great Migration series for the Museum of Modern Art.

David Deutsch and Aviva Kempner
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

Debra and Joshua Levin, who are now married, told us a charming story about their unusual first date. Debra had written a master’s thesis on the work of Julius Rosenwald, so Josh had the idea to take her around to various Rosenwald-related sites in Chicago, such as the Sears plant on Homan Avenue, the Rosenwald Apartments and even his grave in Rosehill Cemetery.

Debra Fried Levin and Joshua Levin
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, September 2013

Thanks to all our interviewees for taking the time to add your voice to The Rosenwald Schools.

New Interviews for The Rosenwald Schools – Tuskegee Edition

by Cieslafdn | Sep 24, 2013 | Film Production

On August 22nd and 23rd, Aviva Kempner, director of The Rosenwald Schools traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama to film nine interviews with experts on a variety of topics related to Julius Rosenwald, the Rosenwald Fund, Booker T. Washington and, last but not least, Tuskegee University itself.

We recently finished processing the 5+ hours of footage Aviva and the Alabama crew shot. Below you’ll find some interesting excerpts from the interviews along with photos from the shoot.

The Interviewees

Aviva Kempner and Shirley Baxter, (National Park Service Ranger)
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, August 2013

The first two interviews of the day were shot in Booker T. Washington’s study in the historic home, known as “The Oaks,” that was built for him on Tuskegee’s campus. Shirley Baxter of the National Park Service introduced us to The Oaks. With its Victorian details and unusual features (a dry sauna, for example, which Washington requested after visiting Europe) the house was not typical of the Tuskegee area at the time it was built and, interestingly, it was the first building in the area with electricity. While some have criticized it for being opulent and out of place, designing and building it allowed students to study valuable architecture and construction techniques. It also served as a showpiece to the northern philanthropists Washington would entertain at Tuskegee (such as Julius Rosenwald, who stayed there several times). Both Baxter and Dana Chandler, Tuskegee University’s Archivist, described the parades, choir performances and dinners that greeted Rosenwald and his guests when they visited Tuskegee. According to Dana Chandler, while the dinners were designed to impress out of town guests, for someone like Rosenwald, who had spent his entire life in the North, they offered a real opportunity to experience another culture.

[The Oaks was] classy, but not over the top. The people that would come down with Julius Rosenwald would be treated to the local cuisine. They would eat turnip greens; they would eat grits: you know, the local foods. And from what I understand, many of them went back to their homes with a better appreciation of what we had here.

In addition to building the house, Tuskegee students staffed and even grew the food for these dinners. Washington, Baxter noted, was an avid gardener when he was not traveling, rising at 5:30 in the morning to feed his chickens and tend to his garden behind The Oaks.

Booker T. Washington feeding his chickens at The Oaks
Photo credit: Library of Congress, unknown date

Later that day, Aviva stopped by the Shiloh School to interview Edith Powell. The Shiloh School is a Rosenwald School nearby Tuskegee, and was the 2nd school built in a community that housed one of the original pilot schools of the Rosenwald School building program. Ms. Powell has been active in the school’s restoration for years, and Shiloh School stands among the finest examples of restored Rosenwald Schools in the country. Ms. Powell described the restoration process and also spoke about what the school meant for Notasulga, Alabama:

In the past, the school represented a way for children to get a quality education. Before this school was built in this area, [education for African Americans] was not of a level that could even compare to the whites. This school was state of the art and it represented the will of the community and the parents to have their children get a quality education at whatever cost. And they are the ones who raised the money.

The Shiloh Rosenwald School
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, August 2013

Along with The Oaks, there’s another National Park site in Tuskegee with a Rosenwald connection. In 1941, nine years after Rosenwald’s death, new Rosenwald Fund board member Eleanor Roosevelt visited Tuskegee in support of the nascent flight-training program and took a test flight with a black pilot (Charles Alfred Anderson) to prove to the rest of the country that black aviators were ready and able to serve in the military. Roosevelt’s visit to Tuskegee is a great story (that you can read more about in a previous blog post) and it resulted in the Rosenwald Fund giving a loan of $175,000 for the construction of an airfield and basic training facility called Moton Field that still stands today. Park Ranger Robert Stewart told us that around 1,000 pilots trained at Moton Field, almost half of which saw overseas action in World War II in places like Morocco, Tunisia and Sicily. We filmed Mr. Stewart in front of the very airplane (a J-3 Piper Cub) that Roosevelt and Anderson went up in back in 1941 (the plane is also visible below). Stewart talked about the heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen during the war, but he also stressed the way the program impacted the lives of pilots after the war:

When I think about what this site personally means to me, I think about all the men who came here that learned how to fly that went overseas to fight against fascism and then came back home and fought against racism. Many of the Tuskegee Airmen, when they went overseas and they had a chance to fly and defend their country, had their eyes opened. Because of the things they were taught here, they went off and helped to start what we know as the Civil Rights movement.

Aviva Kempner, Robert Stewart and another NPS Park Ranger at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, August 2013

Anyone who visits or attends Tuskegee University cannot help but experience the work of one of its important, but less well known ‘founding fathers’. Aviva interviewed Dr. Richard Dozier, Dean Emeritus of the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science, about the Tuskegee architecture school’s namesake. In 1892, Booker T. Washington recruited Robert Taylor, the first black graduate from MIT in architecture to establish an architecture school that could design and produce all the necessary buildings for Tuskegee’s future campus. It’s amazing that Taylor was able to train his students not only to design and build each campus building from scratch, but also to use whatever local materials that were available or could be created (such as bricks). Of course, one of Taylor’s most important legacies is his impact on the design of many of the Rosenwald Schools. The schools were frequently built according to a design Taylor invented that maximized natural light and usable space in small (by modern standards) floorplans. Dr. Dozier made an interesting point about this in his interview:

We find that Taylor was responsible for making a good many of those decisions that we call “green architecture” long before we arrived here today. The ventilation, the orientation of the building on the site and also the utilization of the space. In hot humid weather [Taylor and his students] were able to design buildings that you could open the windows, you could raise the ceilings, let the air flow through. The rooms were flexible. They didn’t have that much electricity so they had to provide light. [Tuskegee] had a very practical architecture – this is all green architecture and this is all avant-garde of architecture.

Robert R. Taylor, 1906
Photo credit: Library of Congress (not online)

Other interviewees included Gilbert Rochon, president of Tuskegee University and his wife Patricia Saul Rochon. Dr. Rochon spoke of the amazing legacy Booker T. Washington left at Tuskegee and talked about what a daunting task it must have been for Washington to build the campus from the ground up:

It was no mean feat for Booker T. Washington, with only $2,000 and at the time no campus, no faculty, no students, to get this place established. Notwithstanding that, it had to come to pass within a city that was very much segregated. In order for Tuskegee to survive it had to provide everything; it had to be a world unto itself. They produced their own food, they raised their own animals, they had their own mortuary, they established a bank; they established everything that was needed in order to be a self-sufficient town. There was a railroad that came through and I’m told that it was the only railroad where there was a black conductor.

Dr. Gilbert Rochon, president of Tuskegee University
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, August 2013

Patricia Rochon told us about the less well-known contributions of Washington’s three wives to life at Tuskegee. Rochon especially stressed the role of Margaret Murray Washington in the early days of Tuskegee, explaining that she had the same clarity of vision as Booker Washington and that she would act in an administrative role on his behalf during the many times when he was away speaking or fundraising. We also interviewed Dr. Kenneth Hamilton of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, author of an upcoming book that reorients the legacy of Booker T. Washington in the history of racial progress in the United States. Dr. Hamilton defended Booker T. Washington from the common latter-day criticisms of accommodationism by emphasizing his passionate pursuit of economic justice.

Aviva Kempner and Dr. Kenneth Hamilton
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, August 2013

Many thanks to these wonderful interviewees for giving their time and knowledge to our project.

New interviews for The Rosenwald Schools

by Cieslafdn | Jun 17, 2013 | Film Production

Four new interviewees were added to The Rosenwald Schools on Friday, June 7th. Director Aviva Kempner (working for the first time with our great New York crew, Dan, Seth and Chapin) shot interviews with David Levering Lewis, Hasia Diner, Gara LaMarche and Maren Stange. Below are some excerpts from interviews with the first 3 of them; Stange’s interview is covered in our latest blog post on Gordon Parks.

Aviva setting up a shot with a crew member
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, June 7, 2013

David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is one of the leading scholars on African American history. He’s also an engaging writer and speaker who manages to keep readers of all kinds interested without sacrificing the complexity of his arguments. Having written an exhaustive two volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois (who worked closely with the Rosenwald Fund) and an excellent article on the shared struggles and “assimilationist strategies” of African Americans and Jews in the early twentieth century, we were fortunate that Lewis agreed to add his voice to our film. In addition to presenting his thoughts on Du Bois and the Rosenwald Fund, Lewis perfectly summed up Julius Rosenwald’s modesty and legacy of promoting opportunity in this excerpt from his interview:

Julius Rosenwald once said that his own stellar success was ninety-five percent luck, but he must have known that most people were not going to have that kind of luck and they needed a significant grubstake. It seems to me that was the great concept of the Rosenwald Fund: for people who certainly needed a lot of luck, Julius Rosenwald was luck itself. (David Levering Lewis)

Aviva with David Levering Lewis, Du Bois scholar
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, June 7, 2013

Despite his amazing success as president of Sears Roebuck, Rosenwald never saw himself as exceptional, and always maintained that he was merely a competent manager who had been fortunate enough to capitalize on the opportunities presented to him. As such, he saw philanthropy as his duty: he was a trustee of the wealth he had accumulated and he tasked himself with distributing it in such a way that it would most benefit the less fortunate and the oppressed.

Hasia Diner

Dr. Hasia Diner is an expert on the history of Judaism in the USA. The author of In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 and an upcoming chapter on Rosenwald for a book about WHAT, she made some great contributions to The Rosenwald Schools. In her interview, Diner contextualized key events like the lynching of Leo Frank (which was emblematic of the increase in Southern anti-Semitism that was concurrent with the rise of racial tension under Jim Crow), talked about Rosenwald’s complicated relationship with the Zionists of his day and brought out the intricacies of J.R.’s collaboration with Booker T. Washington. Diner also talked about Julius Rosenwald’s father, Samuel Rosenwald, who worked as a peddler immediately after arriving in Baltimore on a ship from his native Germany. Peddling a variety of goods to farmers and people without regular access to urban centers was a very common profession for Jewish immigrants during the nineteenth century, in spite of the obvious challenges of the job for the newly arrived immigrants that Diner eloquently described:

It was a very unique kind of occupation in as much as it demanded that a brand new immigrant, someone literally off the boat, go home to home, farm to farm, knock on the door and say, in a language he doesn’t know yet, “Good morning, Ma’am. How are you today?” It’s a kind of almost instant immersion into the local culture at an extremely deep level. (Hasia Diner)

Samuel Rosenwald quickly moved up the employment ladder from peddler to managing a series of stores and eventually became the owner of a successful clothing business in Springfield, Illinois. Likewise, his son started near the bottom of the garment trade in New York City, but eventually became president of one of the largest retailers in American history. Diner pointed out that this progression was somewhat paradoxical in light of Rosenwald’s later work. The belief in education as a route to social mobility that so informed Rosenwald’s philanthropy was not germane to his own trajectory, or to his family’s before him. In fact, to his lifelong regret, Rosenwald never completed high school.

Dr. Hasia Diner
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, June 7, 2013

Gara LaMarche

Gara LaMarche is the former president and CEO of the Atlantic Philanthropies. As such, he’s done a lot of thinking about philanthropic strategies and he sees Rosenwald as an early innovator in the field, even among the pantheon of better-known philanthropists from the turn of the century (like Rockefeller and Carnegie). LaMarche talked about Rosenwald’s conviction about the importance of a sunset date for his foundation (that is, a pre-determined time before which all its funds would be expended) and “his belief that perpetual foundations would become sclerotic… [straying] far from the donor’s intention,” if they were to become too “comfortable and self-perpetuating.” LaMarche argued that this aggressive approach, the avoidance of perpetual endowments in order to direct the full force of your philanthropic giving towards making a “concentrated impact on… the problems of the day,” was a good model to follow, and has been shared to an extent by modern-day philanthropists like Chuck Feeney.

Aviva with Gara LaMarche
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, June 7, 2013

By Michael Rose