by Cieslafdn | Jul 16, 2014 | School Restorations
In May, we spotlighted the Rosenwald Schools of Pender County, North Carolina on this blog. Today we turn our attention to the northeast corner of the state: the Pleasant Plains School of Hertford County. Marvin T. Jones recently recounted the history of the school for us:
Pleasant Plains Church was founded in 1851 by free people of color who were mixed-race. In order to establish the church, A local White Baptist church oversaw the church and the pastor had to be white. During the Civil War, at least 40 men from the Pleasant Plains community joined the United States Colored Troops. After the war, the church founded its school in 1866. Four schools later came out of Pleasant Plains Baptist Church and the school: the Cotton School, the Walden School, the Union School and what became the 12-year Calvin Scott Brown School, the first high school in the region for people of color. I attended Brown for 9 years and transferred to a previously all-white high school.
Around WWI, the Rosenwald Fund encouraged Pleasant Plains Church to build a successor schoolhouse, the Rosenwald school that I am now working to preserve. In 1950, the county closed the school and sold it to the church for $1. Since then it has served as a community center, and it is now dormant.
The church, Pleasant Plains Baptist, where I am a member, has accepted my proposal to preserve the schoolhouse. The first steps are just now being made. On June 27th an NC State Historic Preservation officer will visit the site and advise us. Part of my proposal is to put the building back in use by the church and community.
The Pleasant Plains Rosenwald School in the 1980s
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Marvin T. Jones
As with all Rosenwald Schools, the African American community in Pleasant Plains partially funded the construction of the school (40% of constructions costs in this case, according to the Rosenwald Database at Fisk University). But community involvement didn’t end at the funding of the school. Here’s an account of daily life at the school that really showcases the way the community stepped up to support it.
It was a true family school in which teachers and parents cooperated in various aspects of the school experience. According to former student Calvin Weaver, a family living across the road from the school provided wood for the pot-bellied stove in each classroom and made the fire early in the morning before teachers and students arrived. In summertime the mothers gathered together to can string beans, corn, lima beans, and tomatoes for their children’s lunches. On cold winter mornings they took turns sending jars of food to school. After organizing the day’s lessons, the teacher opened the jars, poured the contents into a large pot, and set the pot on top of the stove to warm. Because the room was cold, the contents took a long time to heat. By lunchtime, however, the pot was warm and everyone enjoyed the delicious soup made from vegetables their own mothers had canned.
From Black Heritage Sites: The South, by Nancy C. Curtis, 1996.
The Pleasant Plains Rosenwald School, circa 1940
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Marvin T. Jones
A portrait of Julius Rosenwald, which was a feature of many Rosenwald Schools, still hangs in the Pleasant Plains Rosenwald School:
Julius Rosenwald’s portrait in the Pleasant Plains School
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Marvin T. Jones
Interestingly, this portrait seems to be identical to the one Lester Mae Hill retrieved for us at the Cairo Rosenwald School in Tennessee when we visited earlier this year:
Lester Mae Hill with the Cairo School’s portrait of Mr. Rosenwald
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, February, 2014
The Pleasant Plains Rosenwald School can be found near the junction of US-13 and Pleasant Plain Road in Hertford County, North Carolina (between the towns of Winton and Ahoskie). Many thanks to Marvin Jones for sharing these pictures and this information about his school.
by Cieslafdn | May 13, 2014 | School Restorations
Residents of Pender County, along with filmmaker Claudia Stack (http://www.underthekudzu.org/) and the Historic Wilmington Foundation are on the move recently, commemorating and sharing the history of the Rosenwald Schools in their part of North Carolina, a rural county north of Wilmington. North Carolina was the state that built the most schools with the Rosenwald Fund’s assistance and Ms. Stack has said that Pender County has perhaps the most extant Rosenwald Schools in the state.
In April, Ms. Stack joined Glen Harris at Poplar Grove Plantation in Scotts Hill, North Carolina to talk about the impact of the Rosenwald School movement in the South. Tickets are on sale now for a May 31st bus tour organized by Ms. Stack, the Canetuck Community Center and the Historic Wilmington Foundation.
Here’s Ms. Stack talking about the Rosenwald school building program, North Carolina’s Rosenwald Schools and her film, Under the Kudzu:
This is the second annual celebration and tour of the area’s Rosenwald Schools. In March of last year, Stephanie Deutsch (author of You Need a Schoolhouse and a consultant on our upcoming film, The Rosenwald Schools) joined a panel discussion at University of North Carolina Wilmington about the area’s Rosenwald legacy and also visited the Canetuck Community Senior Center, a lovely restored Rosenwald School in Pender County.
Wilmington’s StarNews also wrote a recent article about a community center in the Pender County town of Willard that has served the area since the 1980s. It’s in a building that was not funded by the Rosenwald Fund school-building program, but followed the plans for schools provided by the Rosenwald Fund. There are a surprising number of historic schools out there that aren’t “Rosenwald Schools” but used the Rosenwald plans. We blogged last year about one in South Carolina, the beautifully restored Jane Hamilton School on Daufuskie Island. The Willard Outreach community center will be part of the bus tour on May 31st.
The area has another connection to the Rosenwald story as well. Robert Robinson Taylor, founding architect of Tuskegee University, grew up in Wilmington in an integrated community made up largely of recently freed slaves. Taylor of course went on to design many of the original buildings on Tuskegee’s Alabama campus, head the school’s heralded architecture department and contribute to the architectural plans for the Rosenwald Fund’s school-building program across the South, but his years in Wilmington were formative for him. According to R.R. Taylor’s granddaughters Barbara Bowman and Lauranita Dugas, who we interviewed for The Rosenwald Schools, Taylor’s father Henry was not freed until the Civil War, but had been a semi-independent contractual builder in Wilmington even before he achieved his freedom. The integrated community in Wilmington provided an excellent upbringing for Henry Taylor’s four children, three of which attended Howard University in Washington D.C. Robert Taylor, who befriended a schoolteacher and architect from Boston, went to MIT instead, got a degree in architecture and worked at a firm in Cleveland before he was recruited by Booker T. Washington to design Tuskegee’s campus.
Robert Robinson Taylor in his later years, back in Wilmington
Photo credit: Collection of Lauranita Dugas
We’ve written more thoroughly on this blog about Robert Rochon Taylor, Robert Robinson Taylor’s son, and his partnership with Julius Rosenwald in Chicago. Robert Taylor the younger helped design and then managed Julius Rosenwald’s pioneering apartment building for African Americans on Chicago’s South Side, and dedicated his life providing high quality affordable housing for Chicagoans. He wrote a series of articles in the 1930s in the Chicago Defender that laid out his and Rosenwald’s belief in the promise of private capital to redevelop deteriorated, overcrowded urban neighborhoods like the area known as the “Black Belt” in mid-century Chicago.
The history of Pender County and Wilmington, North Carolina is rich and has some interesting connections to the work of Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund. Kudos to Claudia Stack, Historic Wilmington and the Rosenwald School alumni and former teachers of North Carolina for organizing these events and keeping the memory alive.
by Cieslafdn | Apr 21, 2014 | School Restorations
A story was recently posted on AL.com about a Huntsville, Alabama museum’s plans to build a replica of a Rosenwald School according to original Rosenwald School plans. According to architect Greg Kamback, the four-room schoolhouse would “replicate the look of [a Rosenwald School] as much as possible on the inside and outside.” During the building process, Burritt on the Mountain museum solicited input from community members who had attended Rosenwald Schools in the area. When completed, the building would become a place for visitors to learn about the history of African American education in Alabama.
Back in September, we heard about another effort to rebuilt a Rosenwald School in Alabama. A group of students in Phenix City, Alabama, planned to rebuild a Rosenwald School in their town. Unfortunately, they contacted us a couple months later and indicated that their project had been put on hold indefinitely due to lack of funding.
Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see that, along with the numerous Rosenwald School restorations in progress, people are also attempting to rebuild examples of this vital piece of American history. For decades, many Rosenwald Schools suffered from neglect, and indeed thousands of them have been demolished since the end of the program in the 1930s. Perhaps public interest and engagement has turned a corner and many of the remaining Rosenwald Schools will be preserved.
by Cieslafdn | Feb 11, 2014 | School Restorations
A report by a local news station in West Tennessee about a group of alumni from a Rosenwald School in Trenton, Tennessee caught our eye recently, and not just because our crew visited the state (to film at the Cairo Rosenwald School and to do research at Fisk University Special Collections) just last week. Our visit was a great success and will be the subject an upcoming blog post.
According to the report by WBBJ ABC 7, the alumni group has pushed for their alma mater, the Trenton Rosenwald School, to be included on the National Register of Historic Places for over a year. Although the story doesn’t explain why they have as yet been unsuccessful in their campaign for recognition from Tennessee’s Historic Preservation Office, it may be that they have hit a snag on the “integrity” portion of the National Register’s evaluation criteria. In order to be registered, a property should closely resemble its appearance during its period of significance. Judging between Google’s Street View of the property and two historical photographs, (one from Fisk University’s Rosenwald School database and one from the Tennessee State Archives website), its facade appears to be have been substantially altered some time since its construction in the late 1920s.
If anyone has more information about the alumni group’s efforts, please post a comment on our blog. Best of luck to the group in their campaign, as we know recognition of Rosenwald Schools on the National Register can both raise awareness about a community’s history and build momentum to preserve increasingly rare historic treasures.
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
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