Honoring the Rosenwald Legacy

Vicksburg celebrates the impact of Rosenwald Schools and community-driven education through storytelling and preservation

By Erica Hensley

Growing up in Byhalia, just outside of Memphis, Alex McClarty passed the humble, single-story white building almost every day without giving it much thought. He saw it as a child on his way to Head Start and later during trips back home from Ole Miss, where he graduated in 2011 with an engineering degree. Unlike many of his peers, McClarty had a plan to use his skills to invest in his hometown.

It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that he and Marshall County officials learned the true significance of their century-old piece of living history. Built in 1922, the Isaac Chapel Rosenwald School was among thousands of small schoolhouses constructed through a unique public-private partnership to expand education for Black Americans.

Booker T. Washington, president of what is now Tuskegee University in Alabama, and Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, created a fund that educated more than 600,000 Black students across the rural South amid the “separate but equal” misnomer handed down through Plessy v. Ferguson.

Exactly 100 years after it was built to educate his kin, McClarty helped open a STEM coding camp for local students, as part of the Isaac Chapel Rosenwald Museum & Educational Center — the only known Mississippi Rosenwald School currently operating as a place of learning.

“This has everything to do with the people that live here,” McClarty, now expert-in-practice and lead educator at the Isaac Chapel Educational Center, said of his community. “We’re not going to forget about the history, but we’re also looking forward.”

Without realizing it, Marshall County housed one of the few surviving Rosenwald Schools in Mississippi. And although it had been modified on the outside — serving as a Head Start preschool and county storage unit — the inside was nearly perfectly in-tact.

Marshall County officials in 2017 considered demolishing the building. But knowing it was old and possibly historic, they called the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) to evaluate it.

Jennifer Baughn, an architectural historian at MDAH, still gets excited recalling the chills from finally accessing the inside. “I walked into a completely intact Rosenwald plan with three classrooms in it,” Baughn said. “All the changes that happened on the exterior were not at all on the interior. It was just 100% intact — it was amazing.”

At the time, only about a dozen Rosenwald School buildings remained in Mississippi. Isaac Chapel was the kind of find Baughn had been hoping for since she began a statewide school survey tour in the early 2000s. She originally marked the Byhalia building as “maybe” a Rosenwald. Because the exterior had been altered so much, she wasn’t sure.  

To tell a true Rosenwald, you have to get on the inside. To keep building prices low and train locals in construction skills, each Rosenwald followed a strict, easily replicated build design. Baughn usually knows one when she sees one. 

Aside from the prima facie merit of preserving historical education homes for Black students in the Blackest state in America, the real-time value is forward facing, advocates agree. 

“[For any Rosenwald preservation], there has to be a local group that’s advocating for it,” Baughn said. “As much as we want to save every building, not every old building can be a museum. If there’s nobody locally advocating, it will be abandoned — even with a [big] investment.” MDAH approves grants to some community efforts to restore buildings focused on the future. 

To preserve, much less restore, the building, Isaac Chapel needed start-up capital. Like the original school in 1922, much of it came from community buy-in: grants from the local electric co-op Northcentral and the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi; donations from individuals and small businesses; and bi-partisan appropriations from district legislators in Jackson. 

“The community saw a need for job skills and for kids to be ready,” McClarty said. “This gets kids ready for work — it’s its own sort of workforce development based in and honoring local appreciation for education.”

McClarty and the six local high schoolers he works with every week know the value of local investment. It’s reflected in their 3D printer models, the take-home laptops they use to write Python code, and the super high-speed internet driving the program — a rarity in a region plagued by broadband deserts. 

Ongoing funding is key to keep the program running, but the local investment is what got it up in the first place. Thanks to foundation grants and sharp strategy, the program is expanding beyond the walls of the Rosenwald School and into the community — planning to soon install a 3D printer in every county high school in order to support science curricula. 

McClarty, just like the original Rosenwald Fund, is clear-eyed about the brain drain rural communities face. They need industry to keep the community afloat, but too, industry needs a qualified workforce to invest locally. With multiple regional industry additions recently, McClarty knows the time is now. 

“I had to stay home for this,” McClarty said. “We are building something real here.”

As school districts in the 19th century used the “separate but equal” doctrine as ammunition to funnel funds into white schools and deprive Black education, Washington and Rosenwald hatched a plan. 

They identified education as the single-most important tool in the post-Reconstruction South to advance racial equity, and set out to create the only known philanthropic effort to ensure widespread access to education for rural Black Americans. 

Starting with six schools in Alabama, the system eventually grew to more than 5,300 schools across 15 states.

Nowhere was the effort more prevalent or important than in Mississippi, which had more than 600 schools — second only to North Carolina. By 1930, Rosenwald Schools educated at least one-third of rural Black schoolchildren. 

“We know of no other effort this centralized and organized that shrunk the gap between white and Black education access,” Baughn said. 

At the same time, the state of Mississipipi was spending three times the amount of money on white schools. By 1941, African Americans made up 58% of the state’s population but only received 13% of the state’s funding.

The Rosenwald Fund understood that one of the top challenges of remote, segregated schools was attracting qualified teachers — something Mississippi still struggles with today. 

Just as important as teacher recruitment, historians say the community buy-in was key in establishing a successful Rosenwald School. The Rosenwald Fund would typically donate half of the project costs. 

At Isaac Chapel, the Fund provided a $1,000 donation, the white community put in $200, and the Black community provided the remaining $2,600, according to original records. The school district, however, provided nothing. 

“These schools represent a lot of blood, sweat and tears of builders,” Baughn said. “Local Black families gave land, sweat equity and materials — all for the education of their children. To me, the biggest honor to the original Schools is for them to continue to have life in their community.”

Down the Delta 250 miles, Warren County had more Rosenwald Schools than nearly any other Mississippi county — at least partially because of the rare additional support of the school district, a testament to strategic investment from John H. Culkin, Vicksburg High School principal and superintendent in the early 1900s. Today, the county still outperforms the state average for school quality and graduation rate.  

The Catfish Row Museum in Vicksburg honors this legacy through its exhibit “Raising Standards: Building Community Through the School Room,” which highlights the partnership between Culkin and the Rosenwald Fund. The exhibit details the schools’ critical role in enhancing educational opportunities for African American students while fostering a deep sense of community. These schools, built with the collective contributions of local Black families, not only served as educational hubs but also as symbols of empowerment during a time of systemic inequality.

Despite Mississippi’s deeply entrenched racial inequities, communities like those in Warren County exemplified the transformative power of local investment in education.

Culkin’s dedication to rural education parallels the spirit of Isaac Chapel in Marshall County, where Alex McClarty’s efforts continue the tradition of forward-thinking education. Both represent enduring examples of how local communities have historically played a critical role in fostering educational equity — a legacy that modern programs like the Isaac Chapel STEM camp are building upon today.

Today, Mississippi has some of the fewest remaining Rosenwald School buildings — just 15 — much less functioning ones. 

With another Supreme Court milestone, 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education dismantled school districts’ justification for segregation. And despite delayed integration — especially in the states where they were located — Rosenwald Schools became obsolete, and most, like Isaac Chapel, shuttered in the 1960s.  

“There was community loss,” said William Sydney Payne, Isaac Chapel alumni and now president of its new board, of the school’s closure. Born less than a mile from the school, he attended elementary school there just a few years prior to its closure. And though integration expectations justified the closing, it came with trade-offs, he says. And ultimately, unfulfilled promises, as segregated schools still pervade the state. 

“It was a tight knit community, everyone knew everyone and there was complete community participation and support for the school,” he said. “That was broken down when we changed schools — and we didn’t get the attention and education we were getting at Isaac Chapel.”

But Payne feels like the school is now decades later giving back to his community in many of the same ways it did when was a child. “These kids aren’t going to be working in a warehouse driving a forklift,” he said. “They’re going to be the engineers designing those forklifts.” 

Involved with the revitalization from the start, Payne sees the new STEM program as a small but mighty overdue piece of integration. The program has Black, white and hispanic students and a mix of girls and boys. 

“It’s a diverse group of students — it’s like a rebirthed integration — coming from this little all Black rural school house in the country,” Payne said. “That’s the best part to me and I hope all of Mississippi and the nation will recognize this and see how things could be.”

Vicksburg is participating in a storytelling cohort designed for RWJF Culture of Health Prize alumni.