Education will always be the key to success as well as a hallmark of the Black community. Nevertheless, the path to wisdom and knowledge for black children has not always been easy. The Smithsonian A Better Life For Their Children exhibit deeply peers into all the hard work that went into ensuring that all black youths receive the proper academics.
What To Expect and Learn From This Exhibit
A Better Life For Their Children; is an exhibition highlighting one of the most transformative education projects for Black students during the 20th century. It will unveil at the National Civil Rights Museum on August 18. A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America is a photography exhibition about Rosenwald Schools built in the segregated South from 1912 to 1937.
The Rosenwald Schools project was a monumental partnership of educator and author Booker T. Washington and entrepreneur Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald turned Sears, Roebuck & Company into the world’s largest retailer, while Washington became the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute. In 1912, the two teamed up to launch an ambitious program that would partner with Black communities to build public schools that would educate more than 700,000 Black children across the South.
Each Black community and school district had to match the grant awarded. After Washington’s death in1915, the Rosenwald Fund was created in 1917 and was managed at Tuskegee. In 1920 the Fund moved to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Smithsonian A Better Life For Their Children -Education During Jim Crow
Captured through the lens of photographer and author Andrew Feiler, A Better Life for Their Children is a photo exhibit intertwined with interviews with teachers, students, preservationists, and community leaders who reflect on the impact of the Rosenwald Schools. The exhibition is based on Feiler’s book of the same title.
“We often see America’s challenges as intractable, especially those related to race,” said Feiler. “Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald reached across divides of race, religion, and region, and they changed this nation. Their accomplishment speaks to us today. Individual actions matter: we can make America a better place for all.”
Feiler drove more than 25,000 miles, photographing 105 schools, and interviewed dozens to reflect on the program’s impact. The stories include but aren’t limited to the Trail of Tears, the Great Migration, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, only about 500 of those schools exist today.
A Better Life for Their Children is on display until January 2, 2023, and is included with admission. The coffee table book is available for purchase at the museum. For more information, visit the museum’s website.
