The Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Transformation of Educational Funding in the South, 1910-1950

Mark Schultz

What value did tenant farmers lay on education? What, in their experience did education gain for them? This paper will describe one facet of a larger study of race relations in one rural Georgia county from 1900-1950. It is based on nearly 200 interviews with elderly residents of and migrants from this county, as well as traditional sources. During the 1910s and 1920s, half of all African American students in Hancock County dropped out of school by fourth grade, half of all white students by sixth grade. For some, direct limitations placed by planters ended their educations. Most interviewees, however, when asked why they quit referred primarily to the high cost of educating a child in an economy which counted children as an indispensable part of a family’s work force. Many interviewees could find little value in education on the farm. Some referred to the control it gave them in managing their own affairs, believing that better educated tenants were less likely to be targeted by unscrupulous landlords. But the real dividends were not to be had on the farm at all, but in the North. There, possession of a high school or even an eighth grade education opened up a far more hopeful opportunity structure than that faced by most poor migrants. Education did create separation between those who climbed out of generations of poverty and those who did not—but only when they arrived in a new context, a context which their parents had frequently not anticipated when they accepted the sacrifice to send them to school.

About Mark Schultz

I earned an M.A. in history at the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago. I am turning my dissertation into a book, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press. It will be titled “Beyond Jim Crow; The Rural Face of White Supremacy, Hancock County Georgia, 1900-1950.” My research interests are African American and Southern history. I am particularly interested in the daily experience of race relations in the “Jim Crow” South, and the factors which allowed some rural African American families to break free from poverty and dependency. I am an assistant professor of history at Lewis University, near Chicago.