A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, Photographs and Stories by Andrew Feiler University of Georgia Press, 20221
A Better Life for Their Children
My Journey through Rosenwald Schools
By Andrew Feiler
Andrew Feiler, Atlanta, Georgia, Photo: Laura Adams
Inside the small white clapboard Cairo School in Sumner County, Tennessee, brothers Frank and Charles Brinkley stand under a photograph of Julius Rosenwald, who led Sears, Roebuck & Company in the early twentieth century. His portrait has hung on the wall of the schoolhouse since it opened in 1923.
The building, now a community center, is a Rosenwald school. The brothers attended the one-teacher school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, went on to college, then to graduate school, and both became educators. They have four sisters, each of whom attended the Cairo School and went to college. These six siblings have ten children among them, and every one of them went to college. Without this schoolhouse this educational legacy may not have happened.
Andrew Feiler, Frank Brinkley & Charles Brinkley, Sr. – Educators, Brothers, Rosenwald School Former Students, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
Born to Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck & Company from 1908 until his death in 1932. He helped turn Sears into the world’s largest retailer of its era and became one of the earliest and greatest philanthropists in American history. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, became an educator and was the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute.
Rosenwald and Washington met in 1911. At that time, public schools for Black people in the South were usually in terrible facilities with outdated materials and received a fraction of the funding provided for educating white children. Many communities did not even have public schools for African American students. Rosenwald and Washington, forging one of the earliest collaborations between Jews and African Americans, and bringing together Black communities and white school boards, created the program that became known as Rosenwald schools. From 1912 to 1937 this program built 4,978 schools for Black schoolchildren across fifteen southern and border states.
This program changed America. Between World War I and World War II, the persistent Black-white education gap that had plagued the South narrowed significantly. Economists at the Federal Reserve would later conclude that Rosenwald schools were the most significant factor in that achievement.
Further, Rosenwald helped educate many of the leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement to come. Rosenwald school alum Medgar Evers became Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP. He was later murdered for his activism. Poet and writer Maya Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She would later write about her days in an Arkansas Rosenwald school in her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Rosenwald school alum John Lewis chaired the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He later became a long-serving U.S. congressman from Georgia. Thousands of other alumni became teachers, preachers, farmers, tradespeople, businesspeople, and the backbone of a new African American middle class.
And yet the story of the schools that gave them their start was at risk of being forgotten.
Andrew Feiler, Siloam School, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, 1920s, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
Early in 2015, I found myself at lunch with Jeanne Cyriaque. Jeanne originated the role of African American heritage specialist at the Georgia State Historic Preservation Office, and she was the first person to tell me about Rosenwald schools. The story shocked me. I am a fifth-generation Jewish Georgian; I’ve been a civic activist my entire life. The pillars of this story are the pillars of my life. How could I never have heard of Rosenwald schools?
I have been a serious photographer for most of my life. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, I freelanced in high school for the local newspaper and magazines. Over time, my work became something I did when I traveled. But about a dozen years ago, I started down the path of taking my work more seriously and being taken more seriously.
At the outset of this pivot, I had to figure out my voice as a photographer. What was I trying to say? I have long been active in civic life. I’ve helped create over a dozen community initiatives, serve on multiple not-for-profit boards, and am an active advisor to public policy leaders. And I found that the creative topics to which I was drawn were an extension of my civic voice.
Soon into this new journey my first photography book was published. Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color (University of Georgia Press, 2015) is a portrait of a largely abandoned college campus which happens to have been that of an historically Black college. Visually these images present a dissonance between the familiarity of education spaces and the veneer of abandonment. Through this dissonance I raised two sets of issues. One is the past, present, and future importance of historically Black colleges and universities. The other is how education has been the backbone of the American Dream and the onramp to the American middle class since even before there was a United States of America.
Andrew Feiler, The Denbigh School in Warwick County, Virginia which was around from 1920 to 1950s, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
The afternoon of my 2015 lunch with Jeanne, I sat at my desk in Atlanta and googled “Rosenwald schools.” While there were a few books on the topic, there was no comprehensive photographic account of the program. I knew I wanted to create exactly that as my next project. My journey would take three and a half years. Of the original 4,978 Rosenwald schools, about five hundred survive; around half of those have been restored. Over the course of my quest, I photographed 105 schools in all fifteen of the program states and drove more than 25,000 miles.
But at the outset, I had to figure out how to tell this story visually.
I started with test shoots of schools in Georgia: Cassville, Acworth, Turin, Warm Springs, and Savannah. Concurrently, I dove into the essential books of biography and history from which I soon learned that photography played a direct role in the Rosenwald school program. The initiative began with a pilot of six schools built near Tuskegee. Washington sent Rosenwald photographs of the children and teachers proudly gathered in front of their new schools. These deeply moved Rosenwald and contributed to his support for expanding the program. Making such photographs became common and they are a prominent visual element of the program’s history. The visual language of my photodocumentary of Rosenwald schools – black and white and horizontal -- pays homage to these historical images.
I also looked to other bodies of photography. I started with the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose beautiful black and white images of industrial structures documented a changing mid-twentieth century architectural landscape. Rosenwald schools had a similarly austere beauty. I revisited the work of William Christenberry, who photographed Southern vernacular architecture disappearing from rural Alabama in the latter half of the twentieth century. Rosenwald schools displayed a similar simplicity and sense of place. I was inspired by Andrew Freeman’s photography about Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp for Japanese Americans in central California. Manzanar had had wooden barracks that were sold and relocated after the closure of the camp, and Freeman traced these structures across the region portraying their adaptation into a wide variety of uses.
Like each of these photographers, I initially focused on exteriors of Rosenwald schools and the architectural narrative. Over two decades, the program advanced from the one-teacher and two-teacher wooden schools to three- and four-teacher wooden structures to brick buildings of one, two and three stories. While this historical arc was fascinating, the story it told was incomplete.
Andrew Feiler, Interior, Emory School - Hale County, Alabama c.1915-1962, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
As I visited more schools, I ventured inside and marveled at how they are being used today. While a handful remain active schools, most were outgrown as educational facilities decades ago. Today these former schoolhouses are community centers, church halls, daycare centers, offices, apartments, private homes. Many, though, remain unrestored and neglected. At several sites I came across piles of rubble so recent they were surrounded by emergency fencing or yellow caution tape. The urgency to preserve these spaces and places become an integral part of this overarching narrative.
But by far the most emotionally rewarding part of my experience was meeting people who attended these schools, taught in these schools, and are devoting their lives to saving these schools. I strove to capture this remarkable part of the story through their portraits. The narratives that accompany the photographs tell of Rosenwald schools’ connections to the Trail of Tears, the Great Migration, the Tuskegee Airmen, Brown vs. Board of Education, embezzlement, murder, and more. And I further came to understand that this combination of image and deeply researched story was what I could uniquely contribute to photography.
Andrew Feiler, Ellie J. Dahmer – Widow of Slain Civil Rights Leader, Rosenwald School Former Student and Teacher, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
Completing this body of work has been life changing. The book of this work, A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2021, was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, and L’Œil de la Photographie as well as on CBS This Morning, PBS, and NPR. These images have been instrumental in the campaign to create a new U.S. national historical park and inspired the composition of a symphony. They are now in the permanent collections of museums in four states, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. The museum exhibition of this work remains on tour.
When my first book was published, I knew I wanted to do a museum show of the work. My work is in part about bringing people into stories that they might not otherwise access, and museums are a huge multiplier that bring so many more people into the work. But I learned early on that I would have to manage my own exhibition. I spoke with folks who managed exhibitions on behalf of photographers, and I found their approach reactive. They would offer the exhibition on their websites and wait for the expressions of interest to arrive. And they would work with any venue that would pay the exhibition fee. By contrast, I don’t believe in being reactive and I cared which venues hosted the work.
The exhibition of my first book traveled for four and a half years to nine different venues before being retired and landing in the permanent collection of the Auburn Avenue Research Library. The exhibition of my Rosenwald schools work premiered in 2021 at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. It has since traveled to ten venues in seven states with more bookings ahead.
Andrew Feiler, Pleasant Plains School - Hertford County, North Carolina 1920-1950, Archival pigment prints, © Andrew Feiler
All these developments have given me what I call cultural capital. And unlike politicians who famously horde their political capital, I intend to spend my cultural capital. I’ve embarked on a new and complex project that again combines image and story. It will take me to at least thirty states. Many of my planned images require access to culturally or historically sensitive locations and for that I need permission. The wellspring of credibility and goodwill is proving invaluable.
In looking back at my journey through Rosenwald schools, I am reminded that we often feel that problems in America are intractable especially those related to race. But in deeply segregated 1912 America, Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington reached across divides of race, religion, and region, and they fundamentally changed this nation for the better. I think this story speaks to all of us: individual actions matter; your actions matter; you can change the world.
Andrew Feiler,
Atlanta, Georgia
March 2025
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Andrew Feiler is a photographer, author, and a fifth-generation Georgian. Andrew has long been active in civic life. He has created numerous community initiatives, serves on multiple not-for-profit boards, and is an active advisor to public policy leaders. His art is an extension of his civic values.
Andrew Feiler
Photo by Paul Perdue