Rosenwald story insightful look at Chicago philanthrophy

• Reprints

YOU NEED
A SCHOOLHOUSE

By Stephanie Deutsch

Northwestern
University Press,
218 pages, $24.95

Article Extras

Updated: February 2, 2012 8:12AM

Chicagoans of multiple generations are probably more likely to recognize the name of Julius Rosenwald than residents of other metropolitan areas. Rosenwald (1862-1932) built the retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company into a Chicago corporate institution, then guided it to national prominence. Furthermore, it seems general knowledge that Rosenwald made an impact as a philanthropist. Specific knowledge of those philanthropies is almost surely scarce today, though.

In You Need a Schoolhouse, Stephanie Deutsch presents part of the Chicago-based philanthropy saga to a contemporary audience. Deutsch is not a Chicagoan, but her husband, David Deutsch, is Rosenwald’s great-grandson. The more the author heard about Rosenwald, the more she became determined to dig deeper. The commitment to a full-scale book arrived after a conversation with her husband’s cousin, a public school teacher in New Jersey. Her wedding announcement mentioned Rosenwald as her great-grandfather. As Deutsch writes, when the announcement ended up on a school bulletin board, one of the school’s janitors, of African-American heritage, “sought her out to tell her how important the Rosenwald name was to his family. With emotion, he said that his mother had been so grateful for the education she had received in the segregated South at a Rosenwald school.”

When Deutsch found out the so-called Rosenwald schools in the South had been founded because of a collaboration between the Jewish Chicago retail executive and the African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), she had found her narrative. Full biographies of Rosenwald and Washington already existed, but no book quite like Deutsch vowed to research.

The text opens in May 1911, as Rosenwald and Washington, both already renowned but from vastly different worlds, met at the Blackstone Hotel in downtown Chicago, bucking a society that disapproved of such interracial conversation, no matter who the participants.

After setting the stage during 1911, Deutsch moves backward with telescoped accounts of the two men’s rise to prominence. Reared in rural Virginia, Washington overcame a legacy of slavery, virulent segregation among the freedmen and lack of funding for education of African Americans to develop his mind — then helped countless other disadvantaged men and women develop their minds. Because he did not push aggressively for racial integration, Washington faced substantial opposition from some quarters during his lifetime, and since his death has often been stereotyped as an accommodationist or tool of the Caucasian ruling class or worse. Without agreeing with every Washington pronouncement and every Washington action, Deutsch portrays him as the courageous, remarkable person he was.

Deutsch terms her primary biographical chapter about Rosenwald “Peddler’s Son,” as she traces his young life in Springfield and his eventual settling in Chicago at age 23 via New York City, where he labored in the clothing business for his uncles.

The 1911 meeting in Chicago of Rosenwald and Washington surfaces again in chapter six. Wilber Messer, a Caucasian minister and general secretary of the Chicago YMCA, brought Washington to the city with an invitation to speak to a YMCA dinner; all along, Messer intended to bring Washington and Rosenwald together, hoping something positive would result. A great many programs did result, with the building of public schools for African Americans in rural Southern communities one of the most dramatic. One of the earliest opened in Chehaw, Ala., near the Tuskegee Institute college most closely associated today with Washington’s legacy. For many years after Washington’s untimely death in 1915, Rosenwald, his heirs and his business associates continued the school building program.

Steve Weinberg, a Missouri based free-lance writer, grew up in Highland Park, where the Rosenwald family kept a country house away from the big city.