Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington:
How Their Investment in People
​Led from Tragedy to Triumph 

Top photo: "In the North the African-American had More Educational Opportunities" by Jacob Lawrence, 1940 - 1941. Panel 58 from the Migration Series. A Force for Change.

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Overview 

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​Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald shared a common understanding of the power of investing in people.

Inspired by Washington’s vision and their unique partnership, Rosenwald’s philanthropic work became a major contributor to ending the tragedy of segregation in the Jim Crow South and in the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Rosenwald's unprecedented philanthropy, providing education to hundreds of thousands of African-American children and supporting African-American artists, scientists, and scholars, helped generations of leaders across all aspects of society who changed American culture and history.

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Website by Matthew Palatnik

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Notes and Navigation tips: 

• Wherever possible, images are clickable to enlarge.
• Use the orange buttons to navigate through the pages.
• Additional navigation instructions will appear between brackets, such as: [Click to learn more]​.
• The Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka will be referred to as Brown v. BOE throughout the site.
• Works of art used on the site are by artists who received Rosenwald fellowships.
• For ease of navigation, footnotes are incorporated in the text rather than at the bottom of the page, italicized with asterisks and parentheses, like so: (*footnote text goes here).

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