About this item
Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, first met in 1911 at a Chicago luncheon. By charting the lives of these two men both before and after the meeting, Stephanie Deutsch offers a fascinating glimpse into the partnership that would bring thousands of modern schoolhouses to African American communities in the rural South in the era leading up to the civil rights movement. Trim and vital at just shy of fifty, Rosenwald was the extraordinarily rich chairman of one of the nation's largest businesses, interested in using his fortune to do good not just in his own Jewish community but also to promote the well-being of African Americans. Washington, though widely admired, had weathered severe crises both public and private in his fifty-six years.
About the Author
Writing is a satisfying and absorbing second act for me after years at home raising three children. I followed my interest in biography to study the life of my husband's great grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, which led me to a newfound passion for Booker T. Washington and African American history. I knew very little about either but study and, especially, my many visits with graduates of Rosenwald schools and travels in the South have taught me a lot. Besides speaking often about "You Need a Schoolhouse," I am now working on a new book about the thousand men and women who received fellowships from the Rosenwald Fund. They are an amazing group -- from Marian Anderson to Langston Hughes to Zora Neale Hurston to Woody Guthrie. I'm not kidding. Can't wait to learn more about them and to try to pull together a coherent narrative telling how the Rosenwald Fund facilitated their enormous contributions to our country and culture. My children are now grown and I am the happy and proud grandmother of two grandsons. One is named Leon after my father. The other is Julius. In this wonderful, global community in which we live, he is named after his great-great-great grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, and, because his parents met in Tanzania, also for Julius Nyrere.
