Let’s Talk About…Education for Our Children: A Blueprint from the Past

More than 500 schools were built in South Carolina, as part of the initiative spearheaded by Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, from the 1910s into the 1930s to educate African American youth. These schools, known as the Rosenwald Schools, were built to ensure that the Black community could have a sustainable network of schools focused on community and education, based on a cost-shared model with funding from the Rosenwald Fund, the community, and the state. But, with desegregation of public schools in the 1960s, many were abandoned and lost to time.

Valinda W. Littlefield, Ph.D., is associate professor emerita, History, at the University of South Carolina and Interim Director, USCB Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era (ISRE). Dr. Littlefield specializes in late nineteenth and twentieth century African American History, with her current research focusing on African American rural southern women schoolteachers during the Jim Crow era. She currently serves as the oral historian on South Carolina Rosenwald Schools for a WeGOJA Rosenwald Trail project.