In two thousand nine the Harrington School was weeks away from destruction. Then a local historian named Patty Deveau took a closer look. She remembered a movement called the Rosenwald Fund.
Julius Rosenwald was a businessman. In nineteen fifteen he donated money to black communities to build their own schools. Georgia historian Jeanne Cyriaque explains.
JEANNE CYRIAQUE: "At the very core of that movement was the involvement of the community, sympathetic whites and philanthropy, merging together to do what today we’d call partnerships.”
By the late twenties, the Rosenwald Fund had donated to more than five thousand educational buildings in fifteen states across the South. One-third of rural black children were attending a Rosenwald school.
There are no records of whether Harrington was a Rosenwald school. But Jeanne Cyriaque says it represents what the fund was trying to do.
JEANNE CYRIAQUE: “This particular school kind of embodies to me what was going on with the communities at the time, because in many African-American communities, it was African-American families that gave land for these schools to be built.”
Now, preservation architects are developing plans to restore the Harrington School. Amy Roberts and others were surprised by what the experts found about the structure.
AMY ROBERTS: “And they went through it and they talked about how sound it was and how, you know, I mean, they’d never seen anything like this. I mean, it was, like, in great shape!”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25