A new exhibit at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Richmond, honors the legacy of the Rosenwald School program.
Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, after meeting in 1911 with Booker T. Washington, embarked on a program of building schools for black children in the segregated south, a museum release said.Some of these schools were in Gloucester and Mathews counties. Among them were Woodville School in Gloucester, where restoration was recently completed; another was Bethel School in Gloucester, no longer standing but recently memorialized with a sign. In Mathews, the Antioch School remains standing and is undergoing restoration. The original Thomas Hunter School, long since rebuilt in brick, was also a Rosenwald facility.
The Richmond exhibit opens May 25 and continues through April 20, 2025.
According to the museum, “Between 1912 and 1937, the Rosenwald initiative created 4,978 schools, as well as shop buildings and teacher housing, for a total of 5,3...