This Month in Rockingham County History: April - Rosenwald Schools in Rockingham County a Cooperative Effort

Foreword by Debbie Russell: A Rosenwald School was a public school for Black students built in the rural South with assistance from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. The building of ten Rosenwald schools in Rockingham County during the 1910s and 1920s markedly improved education for African Americans in the area 

April 1915

Garrett Grove School was the first of the Rosenwald schools built in Rockingham County. Unless otherwise noted, the images accompanying this article are used with permission from Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Database of Rosenwald Schools, http://rosenwald.fisk.edu/.

Schools for Black students in the rural South were much needed in the early twentieth century. During these years, Rockingham County was typical of many areas in the Upper South. Whether a community had a school largely hinged on the efforts of citizens of that district and often was dependent on the degree of commitment of each district’s school committee to making schoolhouses available for students of both races, ages six through 21. Realizing this need, Julius Rosenwald, the head of the Sears Roebuck Company, worked with Booker T. Washington and officials of the Tuskegee Institute to build more than 5,300 schools for African Americans in Southern states. Nearly 800 of them were in North Carolina, more than any other state. 

The Rosenwald Fund, established after the death of Washington in 1915, provided seed money for constructing schoolhouses from 1915 to 1932. Local black citizens were required to make contributions to the effort and the school board in each location was expected to pay the largest portion of construction costs in public funds. The entire endeavor was ideally to be “a community enterprise,” accomplished cooperatively and bringing greater racial understanding.

To construct the best facilities possible with limited resources, the Rosenwald program developed uniform and readily available school architectural plans based on research and consultation with authorities. One-story buildings were almost always planned, primarily because they were safer in a fire, but also because they were easier to organize and cost less to construct. There were several other physical requirements for each project: at least two acres of “well-drained land,” a location on a public highway, a source of “pure drinking water,” and grounds suitable for a playground and a school garden. All the Rosenwald schools had to have “two sanitary toilets” approved by health officials and some had to get sunlight from either the east or west, so these architectural plans called for large windows to facilitate this requirement. 

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Sadler School pictured here was built with the help of Rosenwald funds in 1921-1922.

Of the ten Rosenwald Schools for African Americans built in Rockingham County, one of the earliest was the Springfield School near present-day Eden. The historical record shows that this was truly a cooperative effort among not only the Rosenwald agents and other state officials, but also involving the county school leadership and local African Americans acting on their own behalf. In April 1915, citizens of that area, sometimes called Moyer Town in correspondence, started the process of obtaining a school for their children by writing to the county school superintendent, L. N. Hickerson, telling of very difficult circumstances and asking for his help. The letter, signed by thirty-one school patrons, explained that, as parents, they were very concerned that the only “school” available to them was one room so small that it would hold only half of their children. This one room was also so distant from where they lived that their “little school age children” could not be sent at all, especially in bad weather, since they would have to walk there. They asked for “two large rooms” that could house their eighty-five children to be built in their community. The families also requested that officials choose a location in “Moyer town” as many lived there on their own land and expected to “be here all our lives.” 

In the coming months, the superintendent went to work to secure some assistance for the people of Moyer Town. He shared the contents of the April letter and wrote to the head of the Division of Negro Education, N.C. Newbold, that the school system could furnish “only part of the money to build the house,” estimated to cost about $600, but with some help could get it built by fall of that year. “The truth of the matter is, the negroes in this community near Spray have no house at all,” Hickerson wrote, “and there is something like 90 or 100 negro children who ought to be in school.”  
 
Two weeks later, the superintendent followed up with the state office, assuring the official, “It seems to me that if any community in the state needs any help this does.” He also included a letter with a promise from the community’s citizens of six days of labor, two days hauling with a “two horse team,” and thirty dollars in pledges that the area’s minister had collected. The reply from Newbold was that the citizens had not “made a very large offering in money or in labor.” “If they really want a school,” he replied, they would have to do more.”

Elm Grove School was built for a cost of $2,700 in 1922-1923.

Hayes Chapel School was built in the Intelligence section of Rockingham County in 1928-1929.

Wentworth School was built in 1924-25 at a total cost of $3,345, with a $700 contribution coming from the Rosenwald Fund. Both Wentworth and Hayes Chapel were built according to the two-teacher architectural plan.

​Finally, after a year and a half of requests and responses, including some negotiation about adding small rooms (of about 12 X 14 feet) for “industrial work,” such as cooking and sewing, the Rosenwald Fund did appropriate $300 for the construction of the one-teacher Springfield School in the Leaksville Township. Of the Rosenwald schools built in Rockingham County, all but three were one and two-teacher structures such as Springfield. Spread across the county, these schools--Garrett Grove, Sadler, Wentworth, Elm Grove, Hayes Chapel, and Blue Creek—were all small facilities financed in part by the fund, but they were greatly needed and appreciated in their communities. One former student at Hayes Chapel recalled that she had

inspiring experiences at the two-teacher school in the Intelligence community near Madison. With her siblings, she eagerly walked across the fields and the countryside finding the shortest path to the rural school, where her teacher engaged the students in song and dance to accompany the lessons.

Three larger Rosenwald schools were also built in Rockingham County—in Stoneville, Madison, and Leaksville. Operated through the rural county system, the Stoneville Colored School was completed in 1923 at a total cost of $4,300. The only one of the ten Rockingham County Rosenwald schools to do so, the school received a direct $250 donation to its construction from white citizens in that community. Local black residents contributed another $1,270, the Rosenwald Fund provided $900, and $1,880 came from public coffers through the school budget. This three-teacher school provided classes for grades one through eight. After Black high schools were built in Madison and Leaksville later in the 1920s, many Stoneville students continued their education in one of those schools.

The second largest of the Rosenwald projects in the county, and the only one of the ten structures still standing—the Madison Colored School—was completed in 1924. Estimating a total cost of $10,000, the county board of education had decided three years earlier that “a school for the colored race should be built in Madison.” Pursuing Rosenwald funds, county officials submitted the required applications to the appropriate authorities in Raleigh. Then, led by John Martin and Armsted Williams, African Americans in the Madison area came 

Stoneville School was a three-teacher structure built in 1922-1923 at a total cost of $4,300.

The Madison School was constructed on land purchased by local black citizens and completed in 1924. This facility served African American students in the area until the Charles Drew School was built in the early 1950s.

together (as they had twenty years earlier) to provide for their own educational advancement. With $1,000 they raised, the group bought five acres on the west end of Decatur Street, not far from the White elementary and high schools, for the location of a school of their own. This land purchase fulfilled the contribution of the Black community required by the Rosenwald program. Later, teachers also financed the steam heat that was installed in the facility. ​

The Rosenwald application was approved in January 1924 and the Madison structure was completed two months later at a total cost of $15,000. While the Rosenwald contribution was at the set rate for six-teacher schools—$1,500—the public school system paid the bulk of the costs at $12,500. When state supervisor, W. F. Credle, sent a photograph of the new building to the Nashville headquarters of the Rosenwald Fund, the director there speculated that the structure “must be among your best frame buildings.” Madison Colored School was built according to the six-teacher, 6-A architectural plan facing north with an entryway, six classrooms and a large space for school assemblies, and even at times, sports. Athletes recalled that even though the length of the space was short and the ceiling was low, they did play basketball there. At least, they recalled, their space did not have a stove in the middle, as was the case at a rival school’s “home court.” The cooperative effort of Rosenwald administrators, local black citizens, and county school officials helped to create a center for African American education in the Madison area that strengthened in coming decades.

Madison Colored School in 2018. The structure, owned by the Madison Colored/Charles Drew Alumni Association, Inc., has also served as a community center and is the only Rosenwald school still standing in Rockingham County. Although there are many in the area that would like to see the building restored, preservation efforts are now on hold. Photo by J. Bullins.

One benefit of the Rosenwald program to all school construction in the 1920s was its set of uniform architectural plans, available to all who requested them. The plans typically ranged from one-teacher to seven-teacher schools but could extend to designs for ten-teacher facilities, such as the one built in Leaksville in 1928, the largest of the Rosenwald schools built in Rockingham County. School Superintendent J. H. Allen wrote in June 1926 to W. F. Credle, a Rosenwald supervisor, requesting “blueprints and specifications” for such a structure, as local officials had already authorized “a ten room school building for the colored people in the Leaksville Township.” Credle replied that he was happy to send the plans and could likely offer the standard amount contributed for a school of this size but would first like to “go up and see the lay of the land,” as he understood the site for the school had not yet been selected. Two years later, what was known at first as the Leaksville County Training School was completed, a building that “pleased” the state Rosenwald supervisor. Later, the large school, which had been built at a cost of $58,000, with all but the $2,100 from the Rosenwald program coming from public funds, was named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Led by its first principal Lawrence E. Boyd from 1928 to 1940, the school was accredited in 1929 and joined the black institutions in Reidsville and Madison as regionally known for strong instructional programs.

The Rosenwald Fund, through a public-private partnership, allowed local people to plan, help finance, and see construction through its various phases in order to obtain a suitable school building for their children. The portion donated by the Rosenwald Fund, though in most cases much less than public taxpayer funds, was a stimulus to get things going in the community. Rosenwald structures all across the South often became powerful symbols of African American advancement in a time when many faced growing racial barriers. The ten schools built in Rockingham County with the help of the Rosenwald Fund provided educational opportunities for African Americans for the next three decades.

During the 1910s and 1920s, in addition to Rosenwald schools, African Americans were educated in schools established in Reidsville through its town school system and at other small schools constructed in rural school districts in various areas of Rockingham County.

References: Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Database of Rosenwald Schools, http://rosenwald.fisk.edu/?module=search&school_county=Rockingham&school_state=NC&button=Search&o=0; Information on all ten of the Rosenwald schools built in Rockingham County—Blue Creek, Elm Grove, Garrett Grove, Hayes Chapel, Leaksville (C. T. S.), Madison, Sadler, Springfield, Stoneville, and Wentworth—can be found at this website. Permission granted to use watermarked images of the seven schools for which they have photographs. No images are available for Blue Creek, Springfield, or Leaksville Rosenwald schools; Credle Report , July 1, 1921-July 1, 1922, Reports: Rosenwald Fund Reports, W. F. Credle, North Carolina Digital Collections, Department of Cultural Resources, http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p16062coll13/id/4756; Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review 65, no. 4 (October 1988): 387, 396-398, 400, 408, 409; Community School Plans, Bulletin No. 3, Julius Rosenwald Fund, Division of Negro Education, Department of Public Instruction Records, State Archives of North Carolina (1924), http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p16062coll13/id/4554; Moyer Town Citizens to L. N. Hickerson, April 6, 1915; L. N. Hickerson to N. C. Newbold, September 29, 1915; L. N. Hickerson to N. C. Newbold, October 12, 1915; State Agent of Rural Schools to L. N. Hickerson, October 14, 1915; State Agent of Rural Schools to L. N. Hickerson, August 25, 1916; and L. N. Hickerson to N. C. Newbold, August 29, 1916, all in Box 2, Folder H, Department of Public Instruction, Division of Negro Education, General Correspondence of Director, September 1915-August 1916, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; Gladys M. McNatt, Eudoxia M. Dalton, and Dorothy M. James, interview by author, June 23, 2016; “Hickerson Re-Elected County Superintendent,” Reidsville (NC) Review, April 22, 1921, 1; W. F. Credle to S. L. Smith, January 17, 1924; S. L. Smith to W. F. Credle, January 21, 1924; S. L. Smith to W. F. Credle, March 12, 1924; and S. L. Smith to A. T. Allen, March 19, 1924, all in Box 1, Folder S. L. Smith, Field Agent, June 1923-June 1924, Department of Public Instruction, Division of Negro Education, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; Madison Colored/Charles Drew Alumni Association, Inc., “History of the Madison Colored School,” and “Community School Plans,” Handouts, July 2015; Betsy Franklin Collection, Box 3, File 118, Rockingham Community College Historical Collections; Charles D. Rodenbough and Jean Rodenbough, Town of Madison, NC: A Heritage to Honor, 1818-1968 (Madison, NC: Madison Sesquicentennial Commission, Inc., 1968), 19; Mike Vogel, “Renovation Won’t Gloss over Memories,” Greensboro (NC) News and Record, December 5, 1985, L15; J. H. Allen to W. F. Credle, June 23, 1926 and W. H. Credle to J. H. Allen, June 25, 1926, in Box 2, Folder A, July 1925-June 1926; J. H. Allen to W. F. Credle, June 5, 1928. Box 4, Folder A, July 1927-June 1928, Correspondence of Supervisor of the Rosenwald Fund, Division of Negro Education, North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, North Carolina State Archives. For a comprehensive study of the Rosenwald school building program, see Mary S. Hoffschwelle, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South, New Perspectives on the History of the South (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006).
Author’s notes: The name of the Springfield School area is spelled both “Moyer” and “Moir” in school records. According to the Fisk database, the Garrett Grove school was built during the transition from the Tuskegee program, as the Rosenwald Fund was just emerging.