So the project I'm going to talk about is the Rosenwald School that was designed for
Hampton Institute, which was a teaching school, an industrial training school in the Tidewater
region of Hampton, Virginia.
It was a project that exists in very few objects within the archives.
So the primary thing that we have that represents the project is this rendering perspective
that gives us a sense of what it would have looked like had it been built.
When I first discovered and heard about this project, I knew what the Rosenwald Fund was,
but I didn't know what the Rosenwald Fund School program was.
It started in 1917 and ended about 1938, somewhere around then.
But over that period, they built over 5000 schools for African American students, primarily
in the south.
And what was fascinating about the Rosenwald fund in general was that it was monies given
by Julius Rosenwald who was a philanthropist.
He was Jewish, based in Chicago.
And the monies provided a number of things beyond the school program, but he funded artists
and intellectuals and writers so people like Marion Anderson, the singer, Ralph Ellison,
the novelist, Jacob Lawrence who did the Migration Series.
But a large part of that fund also gave monies for school construction.
In terms of the Rosenwald Fund, Booker T. Washington started the fund, and it continued
really and grew at Tuskegee Institute.
Washington had this idea that if African American communities could get some monies, part of
the money would come from Julius Rosenwald, he would donate a third.
The communities would raise one third, and local school boards would raise a third of
the funds, that the quality of the spaces of education could be improved across the
south.
And so when you see the map of the school building program, you realize the extent to
which these schools provided a service that unfortunately under Jim Crow segregation was
not being provided, and the fact that African Americans had to provide their own monies
even though they paid taxes in many of these municipalities and to the state showed the
impact of Jim Crow segregation on education.
The original plan that Frank Lloyd Wright receives from the Rosenwald Fund is a building
that is a U shape with an auditorium in the front of that U shape.
And then you can see in the perspective that it's more of a donut.
And what Wright does is he takes the auditorium and pushes it to the back.
So by pushing it to the back, it opens up an area that he describes as a patio and pool.
And this provides a place for children to play to swim and this ties into his own experience
in designing buildings, school buildings, playhouses, field houses for his clients,
his previous clients in the Chicago area and in Wisconsin.
One of the interesting aspects that I found out about the project is that Wright had very
progressive ideas about education and took projects that he had done for his white clients,
fairly wealthy white clients and was willing to adopt those ideas for African American
students.
But on the other hand, when you start to read some of how Wright describes the project and
particularly the way in which he characterizes African Americans as being childlike, enjoying
music and dance, bright colors.
He makes a reference to darkies.
There's a sensibility about Wright that also starts to allow for kind of cultural hierarchies
that are certainly a part of that time and could be understood as being sort of part
of the rationale about how civilization would advance, which was often talked about as white
civilization without necessarily describing it.
I think it's an important project because it's one of the projects that doesn't have
a big footprint in the archive.
I mean, the archive is immense and enormous.
And this is a project that has very little evidence.
What's fascinating was how it touched so many other archives, the Rosenwald Fund archives,
Fisk University archives where the Rosenwald Fund papers are being held and so it, to me,
showed how Wright was interacting with a lot of major figures and institutions of the day
that were engaged in progressive education and reform.