Rosenwald School Documentary Viewing and Discussion

In the Jim Crow era, White-controlled school boards held the purse strings on tax dollars. Schools for African Americans, especially in rural areas, were underfunded, lacked sufficient capacity, and were often staffed by unqualified teachers. "Opening the Doors of Opportunity / The Rosenwald Schools of North Carolina" is a new documentary that examines the Tar Heel chapter of "the greatest educational intervention you never heard of." The documentary explores the work of Booker T. Washington, the famous African American educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute (now University), and Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist and president and part-owner of Sears, Roebuck, and their joint effort to build nearly 5,000 schools for African Americans in the rural South in the early 20th century. Nearly 800 of those schools were built in North Carolina, the most of any state. Rosenwald Schools, as the schoolhouses were collectively known, made education possible for hundreds of thousands of Black students, changed the South and the nation. Join Temple Emanuel and special guests Tom Lassiter and Jere Snyder on February 3 at 7:00p.m. to kick off Black History Month with a look at “the greatest educational intervention you’ve never heard of.”