Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. WITTMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, H.R. 3250 would require the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study of the sites associated with the legacy of Julius Rosenwald, with special focus on the Rosenwald Schools.

Julius Rosenwald was born in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was President, in a house just a block away from Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. He would eventually play his own major role in helping to elevate our Nation's African-American citizenry.

A child of German immigrants, Rosenwald dropped out of high school after two years to apprentice with his uncles, who were major clothing manufacturers in New York City. He was active in the wholesale clothing business from 1879, until he joined Sears and Roebuck in 1895. Rosenwald became vice president and part owner of the company. Sears was the Amazon of its day, and Rosenwald went to extraordinary lengths to keep up with its growth.

After stepping down as president of Sears in 1924, Mr. Rosenwald devoted most of his time to philanthropy. Over the course of his life, he donated millions of dollars to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities, and African-American institutions.

Of all of his philanthropic efforts, Rosenwald was most famous for the more than 5,000 Rosenwald Schools he established throughout the South for poor, rural African-American youth, and the 4,000 libraries he added to existing schools. These schools were cooperatively built with the assistance from the local African-American communities. Donations of land and labor by the local community were matched by financial contributions of the Rosenwald Fund.

In fact, the great legacy is the number of leaders in the African- American community that would come back and actually teach in the Rosenwald Schools. It was this effort, along with Julius Rosenwald, that highlighted the disparities in the United States educational system and highlighted the objectionable nature of separate but equal tenets that predominated the school system under the law.

In fact, it was these efforts that helped Thurgood Marshall, when he argued the case in 1954 before the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education, to successfully overturn these separate but equal tenets of U.S. law at the time and found that separate but equal was indeed unconstitutional.

It was the efforts of Julius Rosenwald, plus the tireless efforts of African-American communities across the United States, that finally got to a place that said, No, this is not the way our school system should operate; we should, in fact, take up the cause of African-American communities; they should, indeed, have equal school systems that are not separate but that have all the assets and all the efforts and all the focus that other schools had at the time.

This was the foundation of that.

Rosenwald, through his funding of these schools, actually was able to elevate that issue to national prominence. I believe, and many others believe, too, that it was one of the underlying principles and arguments that Thurgood Marshall made before the Supreme Court in 1954.

In recent years, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in several State historic offices, have initiated programs to survey the surviving Rosenwald Schools. In fact, in the First Congressional District of Virginia, there are a number of remaining Rosenwald School buildings that are, incredibly, in very good shape.

In fact, many of the community organizations have purchased the buildings, have raised money to renovate the buildings, and put them back into their original condition so that people can actually see how education took place at that time.

They highlight, too, leaders in the African-American community who actually went there and taught at those schools. Remember, these teachers did everything. They came in, they stoked the fires in the stove, and they prepared lunches for the students. They did everything to keep these schools running. This is a tremendous story that needs to continue to be told across the Nation.

As I said, these are indispensable parts of our community. This bill would authorize a study to evaluate the national significance of selected Rosenwald School sites and determine the suitability and feasibility of designating these sites as a unit of the National Park System.

Madam Speaker, I urge adoption of the measure, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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