Julius Rosenwald, a titan of industry with a strong sense of justice, didn’t wear a cape or a mask, or go around looking for bad guys to beat up.
Instead, he poured his fortune into building schools for Black children in the segregated American South, educating future leaders like Maya Angelou, John Lewis, and Medgar Evers.
Why did a billionaire businessman dedicate himself to a cause so far from his own world?
Hate in the “golden medina”
Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois in the middle of the Civil War, just a few blocks away from the home of President Abraham Lincoln.
While his home state sent over a quarter million soldiers into the Union Army during the war, Illinois was no paradise for Black Americans.
In 1908, Rosenwald’s hometown was rocked by violent race riots. Just blocks from his childhood home, angry mobs tore apart Black neighborhoods, murdering 17 people for no reason beyond racism and hate.
The riots shook Rosenwald to his core, because his own parents had fled to the U.S. – what was supposed to be the “golden medina (state)” – from Germany to escape a similar hatred: antisemitism.
Rosenwald finds success in America
Julius’s parents, Samuel and Augusta, emigrated from Germany in the mid-1800s and ran a clothing store, struggling to make ends meet.
Their son went off to New York and started a clothing manufacturing company which became successful. In 1895, he joined Sears, Roebuck & Company, where he quickly started making changes that paid off in a big way.
Rosenwald emphasized a “customer-focused approach,” expanding the Sears catalog to include a wide range of affordable products, especially for poor and rural Americans. This leadership helped Sears become a giant in mail-order retail across the U.S.
Eventually, Rosenwald’s fortune reached $80 million. Today, that would make him a billionaire.
Rosenwald’s fortune didn’t make him forget his roots, however. Throughout his childhood, he had watched his mother cook for the poor. The family might not have had much, but they shared what they had, so as Rosenwald’s wealth grew, so did his philanthropy.
The fight for equality
Three years after the race riot that terrorized Springfield, Rosenwald picked up Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up From Slavery.” He was so moved that he reached out to the educator and author.
With his wife and rabbi, Rosenwald embarked on a tour of the segregated South.
Every institution was segregated in the South – even the schools. It was illegal for a Black child to go to a white school, and vice versa.
Separate did not mean equal. The white schools were better-funded and better-run, with textbooks and well-trained teachers.
If a town had a Black school at all – which wasn’t guaranteed – it was underfunded and sometimes downright unsafe. The roofs leaked. The floors tilted unevenly. The windows were empty, with no glass or screens to shut out the elements. If there were any textbooks, they were old and battered. The teachers were poorly trained and even more poorly paid, and there were limits on what they could teach.
In some schools, Black students weren’t allowed access to foundational American documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Black children weren’t allowed to know that their country guaranteed them equality under the law.
Washington had already established an institute to train Black teachers, but these teachers needed safe, comfortable, well-funded schools so that they could put that training into practice.
Within a year of their first meeting, Washington and Rosenwald teamed up to tackle the problem.
The two didn’t try to end segregation, instead working to effect change within the existing system. This sparked criticism from some who accused Washington of being an accommodationist, but ending segregation was going to take time and Black students needed an education now.
Washington and Rosenwald built their first schools in Alabama and quickly expanded to 15 states.
Rosenwald funded the schools, but required each community to contribute funds and labor as well so that they’d be invested in the schools’ success. This is a method known as “sweat equity” — feeling like you have a stake in something because you helped to build it.
By the 1930s, roughly one in three Black students in the South attended a Rosenwald school. That’s more than 600,000 young people — including future luminaries like Langston Hughes and Marian Anderson.
While the schools were unofficially known as Rosenwald Schools, the philanthropist never officially put his name on any of the schools. He focused on solving problems, not gaining fame.
It’s estimated that half of Rosenwald’s charitable gifts went to the Black community, while the other half was split between universities, museums, and Jewish causes.
Helping communities move beyond charity
Rosenwald wasn’t interested in just handing out money though. He wanted to ensure that the money would help people grow.
In Judaism, the highest form of charity is empowering others to no longer need charity in the first place. Rosenwald adopted that approach, with a “give while you live” philosophy focused on addressing urgent and immediate needs.
Before his death, he established the Rosenwald Fund but included a unique stipulation: The money had to be spent within 25 years of his death. This was because Rosenwald believed that each generation needed to address its own unique challenges with its own wealth.
Because the fund ceased to exist just 25 years after his death, Rosenwald isn’t as well known as other philanthropists whose funds exist to this day. However, Rosenwald’s legacy isn’t measured by endowments and funds, but by the hundreds of thousands of lives he transformed.
