A Few Words
About Us
LOCATION
CONCORD, TX
Rusk County
Concord, one of the oldest settlements in Rusk County, is 5½ miles east of Mount Enterprise in the southeastern part of the county. The town reportedly got its name from the general harmony among its early settlers. In the 1930s the community had twenty-five residents and six businesses. During the 1940s Concord had 125 inhabitants, four businesses, and a school. Its population began to decrease during the 1950s, and by the 1980s it had fallen to twenty-three, where it remained in 2000.
MASTER OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
THE HISTORY, ARCHITECTURE, AND PRESERVATION OF ROSENWALD SCHOOLS
Through the collaboration of Julius Rosenwald, the first president of Sears, Roebuck and
Company, and Booker T. Washington, the Wizard of Tuskegee, sprang one of the most farreaching and successful school-building programs of the early twentieth century—the Rosenwald
school-building program. The history of these schools, and their importance to the communities
they served, was mostly forgotten until the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the
Rosenwald schools to their 2002 list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in America.
This dubious national attention sparked action amongst state preservation officers who began
searching through records, interviewing community members, and scanning the countryside for
extant schools and amongst Rosenwald school alumni who spearheaded their own efforts to
preserve their beloved schoolhouses.
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Considering the importance of the men involved, the impact the schoolhouses had on
African American education and the development of school architecture, and the rekindled
interest in Rosenwald schools, there is little recent information about Rosenwald
schools and the Rosenwald school-building program.
Remembering philanthropy's forgotten hero
The history of philanthropy is filled with giants: Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Ford, and many more. All of us working in the sector today stand on their shoulders. But the greatest inspiration of my career has been a relatively obscure name: Julius Rosenwald.
Born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois—a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s home—Rosenwald was also a visionary convenor across race and class. He was devoted not just to giving but to fixing the inequalities that made it necessary. As president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, he offered unprecedented benefits to his employees, from competitive compensation to paid vacation and sick days, and experimented with an early version of employee stock ownership. He championed a more inclusive, democratic capitalism that aspired to strengthen the American economy by mitigating inequality. And as a philanthropist, Rosenwald was also nothing short of revolutionary: He gave significantly within his own communities—to Jewish and immigrant causes—but he directed most of his benefaction toward Black American equality. With his friend and adviser Booker T. Washington, he collaborated with Black communities to build nearly 5,000 public schools and supported the NAACP, the YMCA, and other vital organizations. As you can imagine, this was an audacious stance in the early 20th century and not one shared by many of his peers.
Someone once asked Rosenwald why he devoted so much of his charity to Black Americans. He replied simply, “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”
I share with you my new guest essay about Rosenwald’s enduring impact on social justice—”Finding Philanthropy’s Forgotten Founder”—published today in The Atlantic. I hope you’ll read and share it among your networks and join me in a renewed commitment to reckoning with the inequalities that make philanthropy both necessary and possible.
Darren Walker
President, Ford Foundation