Goochland County Rosenwald Schools Oral History Project

The Goochland County Rosenwald Schools Oral History Project is a joint venture by Dr. Brian J. Daugherity of Virginia Commonwealth University and Dr. Alyce Miller of John Tyler Community College, funded in part by a grant from the Virginia Foundation for Humanities. The purpose of the project is to document education in Goochland County, particularly the impact of the Rosenwald Schools, and the differences between the education offered to white and black students during the period the Rosenwald Schools operated. The project preserves and makes widely available the history of African American education, community activism, and school segregation in Virginia during the early 20th century.

Rosenwald Schools were a philanthropic endeavor funded in part by businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald through the Rosenwald Fund. He was appalled at the disparities in educational resources between white and black citizens within the same communities across the South. The project began in 1912 when Booker T. Washington asked permission to use some of the money Rosenwald had donated to the Tuskegee Institute to construct several small schools in rural Alabama. After the success of that project, Rosenwald formed his fund. Over a 15 year period, from 1917 to 1932, 4,977 schools, primarily for African Americans, were funded and built. The Fund required some buy-in in the form of public funds from the local white and African American communities as well, to show partnership across racial lines. Though the white community did contribute, the majority of the public funds came from the African American communities themselves, who organized fundraisers and sacrificed some of their own, often meagre, wages in support of a better education for their children.

Because of the fact that rural and African American communities were drastically underserved in public educational resources, many of these schools were the first formal school buildings in their communities, and many other Rosenwald Schools replaced unsound structures being used. Rosenwald Schools were built using architectural plans provided by the Rosenwald Fund to work around common obstacles. Most of the schools were constructed in rural communities that were unlikely to have access to electricity, so they were designed to take the most advantage of natural light. They also had strict guidelines regarding ventilation, interior and exterior color schemes and decorative appointments, the quality of the furnishings and blackboards, and the location of separate outhouses. Depending on the size of the community the schools were to serve, the schoolhouses could accommodate one to four teachers. Often, the walls separating classrooms were moveable to enable the community to create a larger meeting space as needed. Schools in urban settings were often bigger, had additional features like a dedicated auditorium space, and usually reflected the relative wealth of their community compared to those in rural locations.

For more information about the Rosenwald School movement see the National Trust for Historic Preservation, History of the Rosenwald School Program.