The Schoolhouse Network

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up course on the Rosenwald school building program: roughly five thousand school buildings raised across the segregated South in the early twentieth century, on a matching model that combined a Chicago philanthropist's grant, public tax money, and cash, land and labor raised by Black communities themselves. It is the counterpart to The Gym and the Color Line, which teaches what a boundary did to schooling; this course teaches what communities built, and it runs on one hard rule stated in its first lesson: never use a positive to soften a negative. A school raised by people who were simultaneously being taxed for schools their children could not attend is not a happy ending, and this course does not offer it as one. The claim is co-occurrence, not balance. You will verify the famous numbers and find that the sources disagree about the building count, the date range and even the number of students served, then learn why they disagree. You will read the matching model as a four-column budget and work out what share the communities actually paid, which is the figure that complicates the way this story is usually told. You will read two real school cards out of the Julius Rosenwald Fund archive at Fisk University. You will learn why the buildings look the way they do, down to the orientation, the window banks and the two permitted interior paint schemes, because the light was the design problem. You will meet the people who raised the money and taught in the rooms. Then you will hold the program's calendar against the rest of the record for the same years, find a surviving school near you in the federal and state registers, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction about one building and the budget line that raised it. Prerequisite: The Green Book: How to Read a Route, which teaches the method this course applies. A 360 tour of a restored schoolhouse is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.