The Julius Rosenwald Fund

On a recent work related outing to the Spertus Museum in Chicago I learned about Julius Rosenwald and the Fund he created in the early twentieth century to assist young African American scholars and artists in advancing their art and scholarship. Julius Rosenwald was a wealthy Chicago philanthropist who is perhaps best known for helping with the construction of YMCAs for African Americans in Chicago as well as across the United States; for helping to build over 5,000 primary and secondary schools for African Americans in the South; and, for building the Museum of Science and Industry on the South Side of Chicago. You can read a brief abstract on the life and contributions of Julius Rosenwald here.

What I found quite interesting about the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and will also be of interest to IHEC Blog readers, is that several of the African American artists and scholars who were Rosenwald Fellows between 1928 and 1948 (there were hundreds of Rosenwald Fellows) went abroad to study. As I walked through the museum on our guided tour I took some quick notes on a few of the artists whose works were on display and who had studied abroad on stipends from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Here are just a few:

Augustana Savage (1892-1962) studied in Paris

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) studied in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad and Martinique

William Edouard Scott (1884-1964) studied in Haiti

Ronald Joseph (1910-1992) studied in Paris and Peru

Pearl Primus (1919-1994) studied in Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Elizabeth Catlett (1915- ) studied in Mexico

The Spertus Museum currently has on exhibit “A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund” where several works of art from the artists mentioned above are on display. You can learn more about the “A Force for Change” exhibit here.

Education (In)Equality from the 1870’s to 1954 – A Brief History

In Pennsylvania, the 1870’s was a time of important legislative movement. In 1870, the Republicans in the state legislature of Pennsylvania introduced legislation to end discrimination of African Americans in schools and in 1874 an antidiscrimination bill passed the state senate.[1] By 1881, a county court ruled on a case brought by an African American father, Elias H. Allen, who wanted his children to attend a White public school in Meadville, Pennsylvania and determined that “the Pennsylvania segregation law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” and required that African American children be admitted to public schools that were closest to their homes.[2] Vincent Franklin reports that the Philadelphia school system in 1908 consisted of nine Black public schools yet a majority of African American children attended mixed schools. A complicating factor during this time period was that African American teachers were not allowed to teach White children in the Philadelphia public school system. Several research studies by individuals such as Byron Phillips and Howard Odum focused on intelligence and compared White and African American school aged children. The “results” showed that African American children were “retarded” more than White children were which further fueled the argument that African American and White children were to be schooled under different curriculums and that African American school children were to be segregated from White children.[3] Public education in the South was especially challenging for African Americans during this time period. The Southern education movement from 1901 to 1915 saw a resistance in educational reform for African Americans.[4] African Americans experienced both racist attitudes and laws in all aspects of their lives including their education. During this time period, Whites in South Carolina opposed public education for African Americans and Whites in North Carolina were strongly against taxation for African American schools while Georgia allowed school boards to exempt African American children from the compulsory school attendance law that was passed in 1916.[5]

A challenge for public school systems in Northern cities, including in Philadelphia, were the large numbers of African American families that migrated from the South primarily from 1915 to 1930. Vincent Franklin reports that by 1920, the number of African Americans in Philadelphia grew 58.9% to 134,000 people in ten years and by 1930 the number of African Americans had grown by 63.5% to over 200,000 people.[6] Major cities in the Midwest also saw significant increases in the growth of the African American population during the first few decades of the twentieth century or what many called the “Migrant Crisis.” Between 1910 and 1920, the city of Chicago saw a sharp increase in its African American population by 148% or 124,000 people, Detroit’s African American population grew by 35,000 or 611% and the African American population in Cleveland grew 308% or 26,000 people.[7] The migration of large numbers of African Americans to northern cities also had an impact in Southern states and the public funding of schools for African Americans in the South. Many White landowners in the South were concerned with the loss of cash tenants, share-croppers, and laborers who were migrating north and returned public tax funds in order to build rural schools in the hope that many African Americans would consider staying in the South.[8] James Anderson reports that nearly half of the African American’s in Georgia left the state during the 1920’s.[9] To be sure, the considerable demographic shifts witnessed in the urban cities of the North and in the Southern states from the early 1900’s to the 1930’s had a significant impact on the schooling of African Americans during this time period.

The decade preceding the Brown v. Board decision continued to be a time of difficulty for African Americans in the United States. Civil rights abuses were part of the every day life of African Americans. This post-World War II time period for African Americans, despite all of the discriminatory practices they encountered, was also one of hope. In 1947, President Harry Truman was keen on passing civil rights legislation and he commissioned the Congressional Committee on Civil Rights to provide the United States with a public agenda for change.[10] The Committee report outlined the discrimination that African Americans experienced all across the United States. The Committee reported that the legal school segregation found in seventeen states and the District of Columbia was inappropriate and unfair and stated “whatever test is used-expenditure per pupil, teachers’ salaries, the number of pupils per teacher, transportation of students, adequacy of school buildings and educational equipment, length of school term, extent of curriculum-Negro students are invariably at a disadvantage.”[11] Of the 48 states that made up the United States at the time of the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, seventeen states and the District of Columbia required school segregation, four states permitted school segregation to a certain degree, sixteen states prohibited school segregation and eleven states had no specific laws on school segregation.[12] The history of African American struggles for educational equality dating back to the Roberts v. The City of Boston case in 1849 to the various school segregation laws of the 48 states of the Union in 1954 laid the groundwork for Oliver Brown et al.[13] to have their case heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. The time period leading up to the Brown v. Board decision and the years immediately following the case were challenging times in American education. While desegregation efforts were important for African American school children and their families this effort was part of a much larger issue in American society, that being the Civil Rights Movement.

[1] Franklin, V.P. The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 34.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, p. 41-48.
[4] Anderson, J.D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 101.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, p. 60-61.
[7] Dougherty, J. More than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 52.
[8] Anderson, 159.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ravitch, D. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), 21.
[11] Cited in Ravitch, p. 22 from To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947).
[12] Data obtained from analysis of a map showing the status of school segregation law prior to the Brown v. Board case that is presented in Dougherty, 37.
[13] Other legal case included with the Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case included: Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C.), Belton v. Gebhart (Delaware), and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia).

What We Know About Diversity in Education Abroad: State of the Research

The following text is excepted from:

Comp, D. (2007, May). What We Know About Diversity in Education Abroad: State of the Research. The Proceedings for the Colloquium on Diversity in Education Abroad: How to Change the Picture, 48-53. Colloquium organized and hosted by the Academy for Educational Development on May 2, 2006 in Washington, DC.

The best understanding on the state of diversity in education abroad can obtained by comparing the Institute of International Education (IIE) Open Doors summary that reports demographic data on U.S. students studying abroad to the data that the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) prepares on U.S. higher education enrollment. As evidenced by the longitudinal demographic data on the Open Doors website, the racial and ethnic makeup of U.S. students studying abroad has remained virtually unchanged percentage wise from 1993/94 to 2003/04. For example, the percentage rate of African-American students, as part of all racial and ethnic groups, during this time period increased only 0.6%. However, the actual total number of Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American, and multiracial students studying abroad during this same time period increased substantially. For example, the total number of African-American students studying abroad during the 1993/94 academic year was 2,136 and by the 2003/04 academic year African-American participation increased to 6,505 students. This represents a 67% increase in the total number of African-American students studying abroad during this eleven year period. Increase amongst themselves as a group is significant but, compared to other groups, more progress needs to be made.

There are three rather large disparities to point out in the demographic data between U.S. higher education enrollment and U.S. study abroad participation rates. In particular, the 16.6% positive difference between U.S. higher education enrollment and studying abroad for Caucasian students is the most striking. For all other racial and ethnic groups there is a negative difference between U.S. higher education enrollment and study abroad participation. The largest gaps are found in the Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino-American student populations with 8.5% and 5.0% decreases respectively. The demographic data on the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship provides some interesting insight. This table shows that without Gilman funding, even fewer numbers of minority students would study abroad.

African Americans to Study Abroad in Turkey

The Turkish Daily News recently reported that the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA), the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and Diversity Abroad have teamed up to award up to 50 grants per year in the amount of $2,000 for full-time African American undergraduates who have been accepted to a study abroad program for one semester at a Turkish university. You can access the article here: http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=100378