The Past and Future City by Ms. Stephanie Meeks

Author:Ms. Stephanie Meeks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61091-710-0
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

In effect, the schools were the result of one of the first formal challenge grants. Beginning in 1912, Washington and Rosenwald offered African American communities who wished to build a school an architectural plan and a portion of the funding and encouraged local residents to provide the balance. And they did. All across the South, even in the face of systematic discrimination and grinding poverty, families gave whatever they could to see these schools constructed—to see that the children of their community could get an education and make more of themselves. In total, more than 5,300 buildings were constructed in fifteen states. By 1928, four years before the program concluded, one in every five rural schools for black students in the South was a Rosenwald School, and together they served one-third of the region’s black schoolchildren. (Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, one of the most esteemed heroes of the civil rights movement and today a national figure of conscience, spent his early years in a Rosenwald School, as did the grandmother of Attorney General Loretta Lynch.)27

These schools reflect the endurance and resolve of the many African American communities who stood up and stood together against oppression and worked to create educational opportunities in the face of Jim Crow. They are a feature of many of our cities that should be remembered. Today, thanks to dedicated volunteers in towns all over the South, they are finding new life—as community, health, and day care centers, offices and restaurants, and schools once more.28

As the Rosenwald Schools demonstrate, saving more diverse places in our community helps give important stories from our past a greater airing. For instance, Madam C. J. Walker isn’t a household name today like some of her contemporaries in the early twentieth-century business world, such as Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. But Walker—the first free-born person in her family—was in fact the first self-made female millionaire in the United States. Born only two years after the close of the Civil War, her story is in essence the rags-to-riches American dream, one that is all the more remarkable and inspiring because she thrived when the glass ceiling for African American women in the business world was more like impenetrable marble.29

The hair and beauty products business that Walker founded ultimately employed more than 23,000 sales agents, and her thirty-four-room mansion in Irvington, New York, called Villa Lewaro—one of our National Treasures—stands as a testament to her remarkable success and belief in hard work and perseverance. Today, Villa Lewaro sits proudly alongside the similarly preserved Hudson Valley mansions of well-to-do families like the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and Vanderbilts.30

Even as Walker was building her business, one of those Vanderbilts, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was rebelling against her high-society upbringing to create a world all her own. Whitney aspired to become a sculptor and arts patron, and she used her wealth to buy a studio in Greenwich Village’s MacDougal Alley in New York City. This purchase, she reminisced later, prompted “a chorus of horror-stricken voices, a knowing

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