(theme music playing) HOLLAND: Hi everyone.

I'm Julia, a bookseller with Politics and Prose.

We're live with Andrew Feiler and Brent Leggs discussing "A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America."

It's my pleasure to introduce this incredible book.

Born to Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald rose to lead Sears, Roebuck & Company, and turn it into the world's largest retailer.

Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington became the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute.

In 1912, the two men launched an ambitious program to partner with black communities across the segregated South to build public schools for African American children.

This watershed moment in the history of philanthropy, one of the earliest collaborations between Jews and African Americans drove dramatic improvement in African American educational attainment and foster the generation who became the leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.

"A Better Life for Their Children" includes 85 duo tone images that capture interiors and exteriors, schools restored and yet-to-be restored, and portraits of people with unique, compelling connections to these schools.

Andrew Feiler, a fifth generation Georgian is an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured in museums, galleries, and magazines and is in a number of private collections.

His photography is focused on the contemporary complexities of the American South.

Andrew Feiler will be in conversation with Brent Leggs, Director of African American Cultural Heritage at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

He is a Harvard University Loeb fellow and author of "Preserving African American Historic Places."

FEILER: Thank you, uh, Julia.

It is great to be with you.

Brent, it's always an honor to share the stage with you.

Brent wrote the afterword to this book, and he has been a wonderful partner throughout this entire project.

The Rosenwald Schools program is one of the most transformative moments in the first half of the 20th century.

It dramatically reshapes America.

It profoundly reshapes the African American experience.

And yet it remains hidden history and its scope and sweep is largely unknown.

Let me tell you about a protagonist.

This is a photograph of a photograph.

This is inside the Noble Hill School in Bartow County, Georgia, a portrait of Julius Rosenwald that hangs on to that wall.

Julius Rosenwald was born to Jewish immigrants in Springfield, Illinois.

His parents had fled religious persecution in Germany and he grows up across the street from Abraham Lincoln's house in downtown Springfield is a four square block area, the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.

Julius Rosenwald's home is the offices of the superintendent of that park, and it is indeed directly across the street from Abraham Lincoln's home.

Julius Rosenwald rises to become the president of Sears, Roebuck & Company.

He helps turn Sears into the world's largest retailer with innovations like, "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back," And he becomes one of the earliest and greatest philanthropists in American history.

And his cause is what later would become known as civil rights.

This is a portrait of Booker T. Washington that hangs above the mantle of the president's house and what is now Tuskegee University.

Booker T. Washington born into slavery in Virginia, attends Hampton College, becomes an educator, and is the founding principle of the historically black college originally known as Tuskegee Institute.

And the two men meet in 1911, specifically May 18th, 1911.

We are now in, we are just a few months ago, passed the 110th anniversary of their meeting.

This is a rare photograph of the two men together, printed on fabric and sewn into a quilt to commemorate the restoration of the Pine Grove School in Richland County, South Carolina.

And at the rededication ceremony, former teachers, former students and their descendants were invited to sign the quilt and today it hangs inside the restored school house.

They meet in 1911.

It's important to remember that 1911 is before the Great Migration, which doesn't begin until later that decade, and 90% of African Americans live in the South.

And public schools for African Americans are mostly shacks with a fraction of the funding of educa, for the, the, uh, that was aff, afforded to the education of white children.

Many jurisdictions did not even have public schools for African Americans.

And in 1912, they create the program that becomes known as Rosenwald Schools, and they reach out to the black communities of the South.

This is a portrait of students and teachers standing proudly in front of the Jefferson Jacob School in the 1920s in Eastern Kentucky.

They reach out to these communities and they say, "If you will contribute to a school, because we want you to be a full partner in your progress, and we will count as your contribution, cash, land, material, and labor.

And if you will reach out to the school board, the white school board, because while we welcome their contribution, these do have to be public schools, and so they must at a minimum agree to own, maintain, and staff the school, pay for the teachers."

They're doing this in part to create future connections between the black and white community, foundations of dialogue for, as a footing for future progress.

"If you will do those two things, then Julius Rosenwald will make a substantial contribution towards school construction.

And think about the innovative nature of this, the black community has to be involved."

That is one of the earliest challenge grants, The white school board must be involved.

This is one of the earliest public-private partnerships.

Now I'm gonna pause for a second and talk about this image because photography plays an important role in the history of this program.

The program began with a pilot of six schools or close to, to Tuskegee where Booker T. Washington and his team could keep an eye on them.

And Booker T. Washington has photographs made just like this of the students and teachers standing proudly in front of their schools, carrying the hopes and dreams of their communities.

And he sends these photographs to Julius Rosenwald who writes back that he is so moved, that he is committing to expand the program.

And it's because of this connection of photography to this history that I decided... All of my bodies of work prior to this have been in color.

I have not shot black and white photography since I was in graduate school.

Because of that, I decided this link between history and, between the history of this program and these images, this entire body of work is shot, not just in black and white, but horizontal.

So the program begins in 1912 when the Loachapoka community in Lee County, Alabama is the first to raise the matching funds for a Rosenwald School.

And it becomes the very first Rosenwald School.

In 1912 to 1937, when President Roosevelt presides over the dedication of the Eleanor Roosevelt School in Meriwether County, Georgia.

In 1912 to 1937, this program builds 4,978 schools across 15 states, and the result is transformative.

There are two economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who have done five studies of Rosenwald Schools.

What their data shows is that prior to World War I, there was a large and persistent black-white education gap in the South, and that gap closes precipitously between World War I and World War II.

And the single greatest driver of that achievement, and it is an achievement, is Rosenwald Schools.

In addition, many of the leaders and the, and the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement to come, come through these schools, Medgar Evers, Maya Angelou, multiple members of the Little Rock Nine who go on to integrate Little Rock Central High School, and Congressman John Lewis, all attended Rosenwald Schools.

Congressman Lewis has written a beautiful introduction to this book, um, that is just, uh, that's really very incredibly powerful, uh, about, about.

And he brings us into this classroom, this, this, um, this classroom.

What was it like to go to school there?

What role did education play in his life?

And he shares those thoughts.

And I will simply add, I was in Congressman Lewis's office, sitting at the round table in the middle of his office for a couple of hours, working with him, polishing up the introduction.

Uh, and at the end of that, I took this portrait.

This was October 29th of 2019.

And it was on December 29th of 2019, exactly 60 days later, that Congressman Lewis went public with his cancer diagnosis.

And I'll simply add one more thing, Congressman Lewis had his jacket off as we were sitting at this table, uh, on the, working on the introduction.

And we stood up and he put it back on and he looks over to me and he says, "Would you like me to take off this ribbon?"

Which of course is a cancer awareness ribbon.

And I said, "Congressman Lewis, I want the authentic you, and that is the authentic you.

Please leave the ribbon on."

And only later would we, of course, learned of the irony of that moment.

So I first heard of Rosenwald Schools in February of 2015.

I found myself at lunch with Janie Syriac who originated the role of African American heritage specialist at the Georgia State Historic Preservation office, and the story shocked me.

I'm a fifth generation Jewish Georgian, and I had been a progressive activist my entire life.

The pillars of this story are the pillars of my life.

How could I have never heard of Rosenwald Schools?

So I came home and I Googled Rosenwald Schools, and I found that there were a number of history books on this topic, some biographies, but there was not a comprehensive photographic account of this program.

And so I set out to do exactly that.

Of the original 4,978 schools, about 500 remain.

Only half of those have been restored.

And over three and a half years, I drove 25,000 miles across all 15 of the program states and shot 105 of the surviving schools.

So this is the Emory School in Hale County, Alabama constructed around 1915.

It's a rare example of one of the original Rosenwald School designs created by Tuskegee architects.

Uh, and, uh, it is what's known as a one-teacher school.

And I'm gonna take you inside and briefly tell you about the architectural idiom of these schools.

But first, let me tell you about Robert Robinson Taylor.

Robert Robinson Taylor was the first African American to attend MIT, the first accredited African American architect.

And he was the chief architect at Tuskegee.

Many of the beautiful buildings on that campus were designed by Robert Robinson Taylor and his team.

And he leads the team of architects that lays out the architectural language of Rosenwald Schools.

This is progressive era architecture, architecture and service to education, large windows on the left to let in lots of light because these buildings did not originally have electricity, cloak rooms on the right so the dirty outer garments would be kept in their own spaces and not dirty the educational spaces.

Potbelly stoves had vented through brick piers, um, bri, brick columns, and excuse me, brick chimneys.

And then you see this room divider in the back.

That room divider originally had under it a series of doors that accordion back where they could be closed off to separate these two education spaces, or opened up so that after education hours, the building could serve as a community center.

And these, this basic idiom, and it is laid out by Robert Robinson Taylor and his team, uh, persists throughout the entire program.

And I will simply add that Robert Robinson Taylor's great-granddaughter is Valerie Jarrett, um, of the Obama, uh, principal aid to President Obama during his tenure in, in the White House.

Uh, and there's a portrait of Valerie Jarrett in this book, uh, to help tell the story of her great-grandfather.

This is a two-teacher school, the Hope School, um, in Pomaria, South Carolina, the prince, the, um, uh, if you go to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, you'll see from, from this Rosenwald School, six school desks, one pot belly stove, and the original school procla, original sign proclaiming Hope School.

Um, it has been restored and, and turned into a community center, and the Pleasant Plains School in Hartford County, uh, North, North Carolina, a three-teacher school.

Now, I'm gonna, um, notice that these are all one, two and three-teacher schools, with small white clapboard structures.

I'm gonna add an, a point about the cupola on the school.

One of the basic design principles of the Rosenwald Schools was modesty.

These schools were to be modest and part to, to save cost and in, and part not to attract the ire, otherwise known as arson, from the white community.

But cupolas were expressly prohibited because one of the principal architects of the program felt that cupolas were reflective of church architecture and to have them on a public school house was a violation of separation of church and state, and yet this school house has a cupola.

That's because the plans were given to the communities and the communities often built these schools, the labor as their contribution, and this community wanted a cupola and they built a cupola.

This is an expression of African American community agency within the confines of this program.

And of the 105 schools I went to, three of them actually have cupolas.

So we have one, two and three-teachers schools, small white clapboard structures.

By the end of the program, they're building one, two, and three story red brick buildings.

This is the Dunbar School in Pulaski County, Arkansas, Little Rock, um, and it is a Dunbar School from which several of the students become members of the Little Rock Nine.

And if this school looks vaguely familiar with its art deco details, it's because the architect of Little Rock Central High is also the architect of Dunbar.

Now I said of the original 500, of the original 4,978 schools, 500 survive.

About half of those have been restored.

Very few are still in use as educational purposes.

Simply many of them outgrew that use long ago.

This is one of the rare schools still in use for educational purposes.

It's the Dunbar Magnet Middle School today.

Uh, but to preserve these schools, they had to, they, many of them have had to have been adaptively reused.

Of the 105 schools, I went to only 5 are still in use for educational purposes.

So let me introduce you to the Pleasant Hill Quilters.

This is in Cass County, Texas.

The Pleasant Hill Quilters quilted, and sold quilts to raise the money to restore the Pleasant Hill School and to turn it into the community center that it is today.

And now they meet on most Mondays in the school to quilt.

These six women include several former students, several children of former Rosenwald students.

And Lajoice Flanagan, on the front row in the center, is a former teacher in the Pleasant Hill School.

Some of them are church halls.

Many of them were built next to churches because the churches helped to raise the money or donated the land.

Some of them are museums.

This is the Warfield School in Montgomery County, Tennessee, with that, um, pattern from these nine over nine, nine pane over nine pane windows that are some of the, that are the architectural signature of the Rosenwald Schools program, but many of them remain unrestored.

This is the Hannah School across from Hannah AME Church or the, um, the graveyard has grown up around the school.

It's actually on Dead Fall Road, you cannot make this stuff up, but this is, this is an example of the, of what is at risk today.

These spaces contain history and memory, and the ability to share history and memory and those important stories.

And if we allow these schools to deteriorate, we lose that important connection to storytelling and to the past.

And indeed, I came across several times, schools that had collapsed so recently that they were surrounded by yellow caution tape or emergency fencing, the W.E.B DuBois School in Wake Forest, um, North Carolina, that had been, that had been demolished a week before I got there, because it was deemed a risk.

But the heart of this narrative was the people that I met.

Former students, former teachers, preservationists, historians, people that are trying to save these historic structures.

This is inside the Cairo School in Sumner County, Tennessee.

Frank and Charles Brinkley, brothers, stand inside the school under a portrait of Julius Rosenwald that has hung in that spot since this school opened in 1923.

Both brothers went to this school.

Both went to college.

Both went to graduate school.

And both became educators.

Frank Brinkley became a middle school, excuse me, a high school, um, math and science teacher.

Charles Brinkley became a middle school principal.

They have four sisters, all attended this school.

All went to college.

And the six siblings have 10 children.

All 10 children went to college.

This legacy may not have happened without this school.

This is the Bay Springs School in Kelly Settlement outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

I'm gonna take you inside the school and very briefly tell you the story of Ellie Dahmer.

Ellie Dahmer's husband was Vernon Dahmer, the head of the NAACP in this, in Hattiesburg, who was murdered for his activism.

His house was firebombed by the Klan, and he stood in the front window with a shotgun holding off the attackers so that his wife, Ellie, could get their children out the back door.

And he died from his injuries.

That was, um, June 10th, uh, January 10th of 1966.

Vernon Dahmer had attended this school and later turned it into a center for civil rights activism.

Ellie Dahmer attended a different Rosenwald School in Mississippi, went to college, was a teacher in this school.

And when the school system was consolidated into a larger segregated school in 1958, she was refused employment because of her husband's activism.

She had to get a job working at another school more than 30 miles away.

And she worked in that school for, she was a teacher in that school for more than 21 years.

Their son, Dennis, has recently restored the school back to its community central roots.

I'm gonna finally just tell you the, I'm gonna end on the story of the Hopewell School in Bastrop County, Texas.

At the, at the moment this image was taken, the school was in the final stages of restoration.

I'll bring you.

This is inside the school, the modeling on the walls, it's because of the, it's a coat of primer.

You see the plastic on the floor.

The pot belly stove on the right is, is wrapped.

And in the middle is a photograph from the 19th century.

That is Sophia and Martin MacDonald.

They were both born into slavery.

Upon emancipation, Martin McDonald begins to raise farm animals.

He acquires some land.

He acquires some more land.

And eventually he acquires 1200 acres.

And when the Rosenwald Schools program comes to Bastrop County, Texas in 1919, the family donates two acres of land for the school.

Its first teacher is their daughter.

One of her students is her daughter, Sophia Williams, shown here on the right, holding up this portrait of her grandparents.

Her husband, Elroy Williams on the left, went to a different Rosenwald School in Bastrop County.

They both, um, went to college and they both returned as educators and spent their careers as educators in this community.

And now they're leading the restoration of the school.

I found this story time and time again, students becoming teachers, becoming the keepers of history and memory in their communities.

And so I just want to end on a reflect, brief reflection on the title of this work.

Julius Rosenwald was looking for a better life for his children.

Booker T. Washington was looking for a better life for his children.

The black communities that were already being taxed to pay for schools for white children, had to dig deep to pay for these schools, so they were looking for better lives for their children.

We often think the problems in America, particularly those related to race are deeply intractable, but I think what this story shows as people reached across divisions of region and race and religion, and they changed the world.

And I think that this message speaks to us today, our individual actions matter.

And we can indeed change the world.

Congressman Lewis writes in his introduction to this book that each of us have "an obligation, a mission, and a mandate that when we see something that is not right and not just, we must find a way to get in the way."

And so I will, I will close this portion of the program with a refrain of Congressman Lewis's most fervent call, "May we all find our paths to the making of good trouble."

Thank you very much.

LEGGS: As always Andrew, that was fantastic.

I love to hear the way that you talk about this history and its meaning to you, but also its meaning to our nation.

Thank you.

FEILER: Thank you, Brent.

It's, um, it is always a joy to share the, the various aspects of this journey together with you.

LEGGS: Yeah.

Well, I'm gonna ask you, start off asking the first question.

Tell me more about your creative spirit and why you connect your art to cultural heritage and historic places.

FEILER: I've been a serious photographer for most of my life.

And about 10 years ago, I started down this path of taking my work more of, of, more seriously and mercifully being taken more seriously, but you have to figure out what your voice is as an artist.

And what I real, I, I've also been a progressive activist my whole life.

I've just been active on a number of boards.

Uh, I have been an active advisor to a number of political candidates, political leaders.

And when I realized, I thought about the topics to which I was drawn as a photographer, that my, my art was an extension of my civic values.

And you know, we are at this incredibly, um, powerful moment in American history, this George Floyd moment of American reckoning.

Uh, we have this extraordinary opportunity to broaden our telling of American history, a more inclusive American narrative, a more accurate American narrative.

And, uh, I find it extraordinarily exciting to be able to participate in that broadening of the lens, uh, and, and, and telling a richer version, a more comprehensive version of, um, of our history.

LEGGS: I love what you just said, expression of your civic values that you leverage your art to be able to express those values.

That resonates with me because in many ways I feel that about my work.

And when I first got introduced to the Rosenwald School story, I was in graduate school at the University of Kentucky.

I decided to get, uh, a grad degree in historic preservation.

And a month into the program, they invited me to conduct the statewide inventory of Rosenwald Schools in my home state of Kentucky.

FEILER: Had you, had you heard about Rosenwald Schools at that point in time?

LEGGS: No.

I had never heard of it, but I had read up from slavery.

So Booker T. Washington's autobiography and he was a giant for me.

I, I just, you know, to imagine that someone formerly enslaved would create an institution known as Tuskegee Institute and, and really create, uh, a revolution in, in American education.

He still remains for me a, a hero, a historical, uh, hero for me.

So I had never heard of the story, but thankfully when I started to conduct the, the research, I would discover that Booker T. Washington and Rosenwald would collaborate, that Robert Taylor was the initial architect, that George Washington Carver was the de facto landscape designer.

And, and I remember being at a school that was being held up by a tree, literally walking inside of this physical evidence of our shared past and having this multisensory experience with this place.

And I started to understand that preservation was profound, that it had so much potential to reduce the gap between space and time.

But what really cemented this as a profession to dedicate my life to expressing my civic values and space is when I learned that my mom and dad attended Rosenwald Schools.

So it was both, you know, part of a collective identity, but it became personal and part of my individual identity.

And ever since that moment, I have been dedicated my career, I would even say my life, to helping preserve American historic places.

FEILER: So let me, let me just add for the benefit of our audience.

The very last photograph in this book is a portrait of Brent standing on the empty lot in this African American community in Kentucky, holding up an umbrella because it was pouring rain.

Fortunately Brent brought a friend and his nephew, and the friend is holding the umbrella over me and my camera, uh, and we took this portrait of Brent on this lot where his father had attended a Rosenwald School.

So.

LEGGS: It was a, a powerful day for me.

And just quickly, what was so powerful is I was intentional about bringing my 15 year old nephew with me and knowing that the, the school and the evidence of that history was long gone, but I wanted him to walk with me.

And of course it had been raining that day.

We walked the, the soggy ground and I whispered to the ancestors, to our family that, you know, they created a better life for themselves.

And, and for me it was an example of the plea that it is critically important that we preserve these places that hold, embody culture and memory.

And, and so my big question that day when I left was where do memories go when the physical history is no, no longer visible?

FEILER: To connect the dots between that, people need to unders, people need to know about the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

It's, uh, uh, from my standpoint, it's on the front lines of this incredible opportunity we have now to tell this more diverse American narrative.

Tell folks about what you're doing with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

LEGGS: So the Action Fund was created in the aftermath of Charlottesville, and we all remember that moment of violence and tragedy.

But for me, uh, a poignant moment was when white male citizens were marching and rallying around a Thomas Jefferson sculpture on the campus of University of Virginia.

And it felt like they were advocating for a modern form of Jim Crow.

That didn't express our organizational values at the National Trust and it was an opportunity to demonstrate that preservation was a, is a tool for equity and racial justice, and that we could harness the power of preservation to confront the miseducation of Americans.

Thus the Action Fund was born as a $25 million campaign to support the preservation of 150 black history sites nationwide.

And I am proud to say that we have supported more than 200 important historic places raised more than $50 million.

And it is the largest campaign ever undertaken on behalf of American historic places in the US.

It is a moment of transformation and revolution.

FEILER: It's an incredible accomplishment in an incredibly important moment this, um, in this, in this effort to broaden our, our articulation of our history.

I, I. LEGGS: That's exactly it.

FEILER: Incredibly exciting.

LEGGS: It is.

And you know, you so eloquently stated the importance of creating an inclusive history and narrative.

And that is exactly the purpose of the Action Fund, the purpose of preservation today, it really is about building a true national identity that reflects America's true diversity.

And what's been unfortunate is that even though our nation has diverse history, is rich in diverse history, it has often been poor in its representation of that history, and in funding its preservation, recognition, and protection.

So it's critically important that we have advocates like yourself that harness and leverage their art, their tools, their creativity, to elevate the importance of this history and advocate for its protection.

And I, I hope that everyone who reads this book will be inspired to contribute to this movement in, in some way.

FEILER: Yeah, uh, think you.

Look, I'd say two things.

One, I mean, this, this particular, um, book, what I try to do with my work is use photography to bring people who might not otherwise be invite, feel invited in, into parts and into important narratives in our history.

This particular body of work is actually a hybrid body of work.

I found so much incredible richness that I felt moved to write a story that goes with every photograph or in some cases, pairs of photographs, because I found Rosenwald Schools directly connected to the Trail of Tears, the, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tuskegee Airmen.

In fact, there is in fact murder and embezzlement, and the Brown vs. Board of Education.

I mean, it's really kind of striking.

And so there's this whole, this program is connected to the sweep of American history.

Um, but I think beyond that, what has, one of the things that has resonated with people is the first thing that sparked me.

Like how did I never know this story?

LEGGS: Yeah.

FEILER: And I think that there's an incredible excitement in finding a history and, and recognizing that there is a component of there's this missing pieces.

And when you find these missing pieces, I think it's incredibly exciting.

And so I think this work that you're doing and that others are doing to, to bring Asian American history more into our history, Jewish American history more into our history, um, LGBT, uh, Q American history into that history.

I think it's a, it's a great moment for, um, uh, this, it's an ex, it's an exciting time to be in this sort of history sharing, history shaping business.

LEGGS: I agree completely.

We're part of the, the cultural reckoning.

I'm curious, what does historic preservation mean to you?

And do you consider yourself a preservationist?

FEILER: I'm absolutely a preservation.

So I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, um, in the height of the Restoration Movement.

Um, Lee Adler was contemporary of my parents who helped, found the National Trust.

He invented this mechanism known as the revolving fund that, um, um, that is a tool that has been essential in the history of the National Trust and the history of historic preservation in America.

Um, my parents were involved in restoring some of the, um, old structures in, in downtown Savannah.

I had this fantasy of one day living in an old fire station complete with a fire pole.

And I moved to Atlanta, Georgia and I found out that all the fire, almost all the fire stations are one story.

But my wife and I ended up stumbling upon what we call a building, which, um, we bought an old, it's a, it's a small building that was an office.

It was actually a showroom for an historic brick company, um, that actually played as credit where the, the protagonist in this story helped overturn this horrific, um, element of Jim Crow called convict leasing, where the state trumped up charges on poor African Americans and essentially leased them out, re-enslaved them to heavy manufacturers.

The brick industry was one of the worst offenders.

The guy whose name is actually above the door of our home, uh, is credited with leading the fight that overturned convict leasing in the State of Georgia.

And that's just a good example of how storytelling and history come back to, come together in these spaces that, I, I never knew what a convict leasing system, I didn't know about that horrific aspect of Jim Crow, nor did I know the heroes who were involved in the front lines of trying to be the rare Southern progressive, and the progressive mostly being a Northern movement, um, to help basically change and reshape that aspect of Southern history.

And so it's just a great example of, you know, what is, uh, of how preservation helps enable us to tell and understand this more complex, more complete American narrative.

LEGGS: That's exactly.

Yeah.

Wow.

And so now you restored a historic building?

FEILER: Yeah.

Yes.

And we, and I'll just say, we got, we have this little plaque, right, and I like, I want to put it up in the powder room because if we put it up on the front of our building, all these people are gonna come up and look in our front door and try to read the plaque.

And my wife is like, "I did all the research for that, that goes on the front door."

And the plaque is in fact next to our front door.

LEGGS: So what I thought was beautiful about what you just shared is not only that there are progressives in the South historically, including the black community, but it's just another example of agency and self-determination.

FEILER: Yes.

LEGGS: And that for me is, is the power, the embodied power in this story, and thinking about all of the black communities that with limited resources, but understanding that education is the pathway to freedom, to equality.

What I thought was beautiful about Tuskegee and, and Rosenwald that Rosenwald Schools standing as a physical manifestation of a, of social movement in response to crisis in black education, that the architecture links to racial justice, that these architecturally designed school buildings for black children, it said that they mattered.

It said that these communities mattered.

There are so many different compelling stories embedded within this legacy, it's just remarkable.

And the impact, the fact that so many African American families had, have some connection to Rosenwald Schools.

FEILER: Yeah.

I mean, beside the civil rights, uh, leaders and foot soldiers who become, um, uh, who went through Rosenwald Schools, there are people watching this tonight who have ancestors who went to Rosenwald Schools.

Uh, Oprah Winfrey has, uh, an ancestor who attended, who was involved in Rosenwald Schools.

Spike Lee has an ancestor who went to Rosenwald Schools.

I mean, it, it is a who's who of African American, um, uh, culture today and it has sweeping impact.

But let me, I want to add, of all, of all the, I did a lot of research.

I mean my process is just to read and shoot, and shoot and read, and the shooting in forms of reading and reading in forms of shooting, and early on I came across these stories.

Remember, we have to remember that during slavery, education was banned, literacy banned, and there's these stories after, and so at the end of emancipation, the single greatest imperative for, into bringing African Americans into the sweep of America is education.

And there are these incredibly moving stories of people, young and old walking day and night to get to these places that were schools so that they could become literate, that they could get an education.

Historically black colleges predo, predominantly began as teachers colleges so that they could teach teachers to get out into these, into these central lands.

And the Freedmen's Bureau creates schools, um, across the South, but when reconstruction ends, the compromise of 1877 and the, and the Northern forces are, are, were, the American forces are withdrawn from the South, all of that infrastructure is dismantled, then we go back into this period of time where education is very difficult to achieve until the Rosenwald Schools program comes along.

And I'll simply add two more.

One of the things that John Lewis writes in his introduction, this phrase, which I've latched on to, which I just find so beautiful is he says, "Education is the cornerstone of democracy."

LEGGS: Uh-huh.

FEILER: Rosenwald Schools.

There's very few of these surviving schools in Louisiana in part because the climate is just tough bayou climate is tough on wooden structures, but the Ro, one of the, the Louisiana School, um, is one of the school, uh, still in use, one of the Rosenwald Schools in Louisiana, the Plaisance School, it's still in use for education purposes because they built onto it, these sort of brick structures in 1960, and it's now Plaisance Elementary.

And I wanted to, I, I'd been there actually once before.

It's actually really, it's laid out in a very strange way.

It's incredibly difficult to shoot.

And I just trying to figure out conceptually how you shoo, I was gonna go back and how do you shoot it?

And I decided to go early one morning when the school buses are gonna dropping off and maybe I would do something with a blurry school bus, and that turned out not to work.

But I'm gonna be out in front of the school at 7:00 AM, the school buses are passing by and I'm like, "I need to tell somebody that I'm coming."

So I called and introduced myself to the principal.

She knew I was coming.

I was to stop in front of the school and I took these photographs and I went inside to introduce myself.

And it turns out she was a bit of an historian of Rosenwald Schools.

And she knew that this school was one of the schools where, um, that was an early, early school program, 70% of the money came from the black community.

30% came from Julius Rosenwald.

The white community, the white school board put up nothing.

And she was marveling at what that meant.

LEGGS: Uh-huh.

FEILER: She says they worked and they strove and they did what they could to make a better life for their children because in their eyes, education was truly liberation.

And it is from that conversation, that line, that we take the title of this book.

LEGGS: Wow.

That is so beautiful.

Were there any Rosenwald School, Rosenwald high schools?

FEILER: Yeah.

So, um, the short answer is yes.

Um, they, uh, the schools varied.

So first of all, we had one-teacher school, two-teacher schools all the way up to, uh, uh, there's a school in Fort Valley, um, uh, Georgia that I shot that's an 18 teacher school, the school in Farmville, Virginia that is tied to the litigation case of Brown vs. Board, an 11-teachers school.

Um, some of these schools vary dramatically, uh, in, in size.

But basically, um, and so the, the na, in Congressman Lewis School, for example, it's a two-room school and, and one room was taught grade, grades one through three, and the other is for grades four through six.

Generally, there were three types of Rosenwald Schools.

The community schools that everybody walked, could, would walk to, uh, that's why there's so many of these.

Some of these counties have, there's counties that have 25 Rosenwald Schools or small structures because the black community was not given buses so they had to walk to their schools.

Those, those tended to be sort of in some form of sort of one through six, one through eight.

Then there were some, some, um, community schools that were two stories that served a larger black community where they may, might, maybe have some transportation options, or there was a denser bla, black community.

Those could be anything from elementary to middle schools to high schools.

But there was this quirky term called a County Training School that really was the high school.

And if you went to, if you wanted to go onto high school, you went to these County Training Schools.

And that euphemism was deliberate because it suggested, there was this schism in, um, education at the time for both blacks and whites, the, and the, the term was there was classical education, reading, writing, arithmetic, and industrial education, what we would call vo-tech today.

And the idea of County Training Schools suggested to the white community that this was vo-tech and therefore it was keeping the African American population working on the farms, uh, um, but in fact it, it masked the rigors of the curriculum, which was often a gra, um, uh, solid classic education.

LEGGS: Thank you for that, Andrew.

"What did you learn about Rosenwald and how he became dedicated to encouraging education of African American children?"

FEILER: First of all, Julius Rosenwald grows up, um, as a member of the synagogue in Chicago, run by Emil Hirsch, a progressive rabbi who is one of the rabbis who sets this precedent that reform Judaism is tied to, to Cunalum, the active engagement of the Jewish community and, um, and to, to the rough translation from the Hebrew is "healing the bridge in the world."

So he progre, he, he preached a progressive reform activist Judaism.

And Julius Rosenwald grows up in that environment, um, excuse me, is, is, um, um, is active in that, in that community.

And it's in 1910 where he, um, begins, um, his foray into, uh, African American, um, uh, uplift to use these schools.

When the folks at the YMCA in Chicago come to him and ask him if he will contribute to a Black YMC, and he says two things that shocks them.

He says, "Number one, uh, I will contribute $25,000," it's a lot of money in 1910, um, "To a YMCA if the, if the rest of the community, black and white, would raise another $75,000."

This is the beginning of this matching grant concept, challenge grant concept.

And he then says, "And I will do that for any major city in America."

And this program funds 24 YMCAs, including the Butler Street Y here in Atlanta, which by the way is boarded up and not restored, but plays this very storied role in, in, uh, civil rights history of Atlanta and including YMCA in Washington, D.C. LEGGS: Wow.

FEILER: Um, and that's where it begins.

And what Julius Rosenwald says, "I believe," remember he is motivated, he is motivated by his Judaism and because he says, "I believe in America, but I do not see how America can go forward if, if part of her people are left behind."

He sees America as a safe haven from antisemitism, but he sees that safe haven weakened by our treatment of African Americans.

And that's what makes him, that's what positions him to be on the front lines of this, this foundation of the civil rights movement, and this major, uh, foundation of the Jew, black Jewish, uh, alliance that becomes a pillar of the civil rights movement.

There's a direct connection between the relationship, the friendship between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, the relationship between Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marches with Dr. King and who famously says that when he marched with King, he felt like his feet were praying.

And what happened in Georgia earlier this year when Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff criss crossed this state for two months together and clearly developed, not just a political alliance, but a deep personal friendship, and Georgia sends its first African American and its first Jew to the United States Senate.

That relationship between Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff stands on the shoulders of Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington.

LEGGS: Wow.

Hmm.

It's just so fascinating what inspires someone to, to be part of change at a scale like Rosenwald Schools.

I mean, it's just such a transformational story.

FEILER: Well, let, let me, let me just pivot off of that and ask you a related question.

You have come across, you have, you have come across other hidden history, you have been, had the opportunity to help save hidden history, um, and preserve these structures that help communicate this history.

Give us an example of a, a, a preservation initiative where you have worked, or, or the Action Fund and your work has helped share a story that you didn't know, but that's really, uh, that it is this powerful part of our more diverse American narrative that we're working to tell?

LEGGS: That is a really good question, and, and it's, it's interesting.

There are so many stories that I didn't know.

So, so before I answer that question, I'm, often when I give a keynote, I will ask the audience, "Have you ever heard of Madam CJ Walker, America's first self-made female millionaire?"

'Cause I think it's important that white women and other women understand Madam Walker's life and her contribution to business in our nation.

And most of the time it's, "No."

FEILER: Mm-hmm.

LEGGS: When I asked the audience, have they ever heard of Pauli Murray, civil rights activists, uh, racial justice champion, gender advocate.

Thurgood Marshall refers to her legal research as the Bible of civil rights law.

She was the first African American Episcopal saint, co-founder of the National Organization of Women.

I could go on and on about Pauli Murray's legacy and it's overlooked and it's yet still to be known.

And we have invested in the physical preservation of the building.

Uh, we funded the development of an interpretation plan that will guide how they tell this story in some, some other ways that we've intervened.

But that is like one example of many where these remarkable stories, these big American stories are not known.

FEILER: Yeah.

But tho, those are, those are great examples.

And, uh, for those listening, there's a new documentary that just came out a couple of months ago about Pauli Murray.

Um, and there is, uh, Madam CJ Walker had a site on Auburn Avenue, which, um, is, uh, part of the Auburn Avenue history and, uh, of Atlanta, the black community of, of Atlanta.

LEGGS: Can you talk about the relationship between writing and photography?

Does photography inspire writing or do you find yourself imagining imagery when you write and read?

FEILER: That's an interesting question.

So I, look I'm a, I am a photographer and I think that there is this bias in documentary photography and other forms of photography that the photographs should tell the whole story.

Um, there are, there is a voice out there that says that words should not be necessary to compliment, uh, an image.

So the image should stand alone.

And my, my first body of work is, is there's, there's (inaudible) there's literary content in, in, in that book.

Uh, that book, this book came out in 2015, but th, there's no stories that go with the photographs.

What I found these, these photographs, I mean, there was essays in this book that framed this history and these photographs which tell the exterior narrative, this architectural narrative from beginning to, from the small whites, white clapboard structures to the red brick buildings at the end of the program, the in, interiors, the adaptive reuse narrative, the portraits and the people who are the former students and former teachers, those images could work on their own if they needed to.

But I, I, my, I, I read a lot, and I've read 39 books in the course of doing this project.

I read about 75 white papers and, um, and length and articles and because actually, courtesy of the experience of getting the building that I am sitting in tonight listed on the National Register of Historic Places, I knew how powerful the National Register nomination forms were in terms of their encapsulation about architectural history and their broader history of whatever, the structure is.

There's 100 of the Rosenwald Schools listed on the National Register of Historic Places, I counted them and I have read 50 of those nomination forms.

That's where, for example, I found out that Eleanor Roosevelt School in, in Warm Springs, Georgia, that Eleanor Franklin Roosevelt presides over the dedication, the head of the WPA comes into the White House to see, um, President Roosevelt and to report back 'cause the WPA has contributed some of the money for the school.

And he reports that the whites, the white community has put in, the white school board has put in, the black community has put in, the WPA has put in, and they're $1,000 short.

And in the oval office, Franklin Roosevelt pulls out his checkbook and writes a $1,000 check that closes that deal.

That story is in the National Register nomination form for that, for that school.

LEGGS: Wow.

FEILER: How can I not share that story?

And so that's why I decided that I had to write these stories.

And it's 16,000 words of stories.

It took me all summer, um, before I turned this book into my publisher to write all of those stories, but all along, I was taking notes and keeping everything organized and writing references to articles that I've come across.

So I was like hyper organized and I was able to knock them off and, uh, to come back and come to draggle to the dinner table and tell my wife, "Okay, I'm at 23 stories.

Okay, I'm at 28 stories."

And I was counting up until I got to, what turned out to be 69 stories.

LEGGS: Wow.

That is amazing.

And I, I just thought that story that you just told about the president, that is remarkable, and really no one knows that.

I want to read as a last question from Reggie Gobane.

And he says, "Other than via the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, is there a more direct way to contribute to the preservation of one or more Rosenwald Schools?"

FEILER: Each of the states has an affiliate of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

There's the Georgia Trust, there's Preservation Virginia.

These groups in the 15 Rosenwald states.

Uh, so the 11 states of the former Confederacy plus, um, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland.

Each of those states has an historic preservation office and, um, or initiative and they know about the Rosenwald Schools and they have a program to, to be engaged in those schools.

And then, um, you can follow me on social media.

When I find out about specific communities coming together, I posted one just this morning in, um, in Virginia, uh, a group of alumni are coming together to try to preserve a specific one-teacher Rosenwald School in their community.

Um, when I find those stories, I'm posting them and you can find out about individual schools, uh, and the efforts to preserve them.

And then as Brent said, um, look in your community, look in your space, look in your area, um, for preserved schools, 'cause there's originally school in Prince George's County, it's in my book.

Uh, you have to call and make an appointment, but you can see the originally school in, that's in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Um, I just talked, uh, last week, there's a group of, um, Howard University alumni that have purchased a Rosenwald School in, um, Montgomery County and they're trying to preserve that.

Um, that, there's lots of ways to get involved, um, again, from the national level to the state level, to the local level.

HOLLAND: Thank you both so much for this incredible discussion.

You can see that everyone out there at home is so fascinated and so engaged.

Thanks to Andrew Feiler, Brent Leggs, and our audience out there for engaging with us.

We hope you'll stay tuned and stay with us.

And from our shelves to yours, we hope you're out there staying strong, staying safe, and of course staying well-read and we will see you next time.

Thank you both again.

Have a great evening.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose book store locations or online at politics-prose.com.

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