The McCracken County Public Library presents its next installment of the Evenings Upstairs in celebration of Black History Month with a presentation on the McCracken County Julius Rosenwald Schools led by Dr. Alicestyne Turley. Turley is an author, educator, and historian who served as Director of the Freedom Stories: Unearthing the Black Heritage of Appalachia for the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN, and is currently the third vice president of the Kentucky Historical Society Governing Board. Daniel Hurt speaks to Turley about the upcoming presentation, which will discuss the historic McCracken County schools, the men who worked to create them, and how the public received their efforts.
After the American Reconstruction era, one of the long-term goals of African Americans was the attainment of education for their children. Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears and Roebuck, worked with Booker T. Washington, a social reformer and the president of the Tuskegee Institute, to secure funding for schools. This partnership led to the constitution of over 50 schools in western Kentucky, including four schools in McCracken County, between 1917 and 1930. Although McCracken County received four Rosenwald schools, Rosenwald and Washington's efforts began in the deep South.
“The first schools, of course, were built in Alabama. And the program was so successful that other states wanted to be able to say that they had a quality education program for their Black students because, during this time, African Americans were struggling for public education,” says Turley. “They weren't welcomed in public schools. And so it was a public school building program initiated by Booker T. Washington with the funding from Julius Rosenwald.”
There was no funding support from Rosenwald initially, Turley explains. Originally, companies like Standard Oil and Mobil Oil started donating money to construct the Black schools. When this funding began to dry up, Rosenwald stepped in and matched funds raised by local communities fighting to build schools in their area. Rosenwald, who was of Jewish heritage and felt a connection to and empathy for the discrimination of the Black community, became the sole funder of the project.
“He was a great supporter of Booker T. Washington's work at Tuskegee, so he became the all-out funder for the construction of black schools, not only in Alabama but around the country. They both wanted to put schools in all 15 southern states. And that's what they did.”
These schools were usually single-room schoolhouses with one teacher instructing a relatively small group of students, generally about thirty. The construction of these schools was not always met with positive reception. Amidst the highly segregated South of the early 20th century, some community members viewed the construction of Black schools as a threat to the established white order. The Rosenwald schools were often burned down or damaged by these residents.
“A whole lot of the schools were burned. In fact, two schools that were built in McCracken County were actually burned down. The Grahamville and Woodland schools were both burned after they were constructed,” Turley said. “There wasn't very much support for Black education. A lot of these schools were seen as violating social norms. There was always a struggle to protect them from people who would come out at night and burn them.”
Turley says that Rosenwald was not surprised by the vandalism or the discrimination against the Black community. "He was Jewish," Turley explains, "and he'd suffered a great deal of discrimination trying to be a businessman." After struggling to sell goods in the general marketplace, Rosenwald developed sales catalogs that allowed anyone — a wealthy family in Chicago or a poor Black family in rural Mississippi — to order goods and have them delivered to their door. The popularity of Rosenwald's catalogs made him a household name, which soon made his businesses a target of angry anti-Black protestors. Post offices had their Sears and Roebucks catalogs burned and stolen so frequently that the Black community developed their own system of receiving and sharing them.
After the Rosenwald Schools were largely destroyed, society returned to the way it was: white-dominated with no system of Black education. “African Americans just basically go back to what they had been doing, which was using church facilities and people's homes, where they would have classrooms,” Turley said. She said she's unsure how the Black communities of McCracken County adapted after the burning of the Grahamville and Woodland schools, but she assumes they also reverted to homeschool or church environments for education. Turley says this would be a great project for someone to take on and discover what happened after the schools were burned.
Dr. Alicestyne Turley will present "McCracken County Julius Rosenwald Schools" as part of the McCracken County Public Library's Evenings Upstairs series on Thursday, February 22, at 5:30 pm in the second-floor meeting room. The event is free and open to the public. For more information on library programming, visit McLib.net.
