Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Restoring Rosenwald: The Oak Grove School

Restoring Rosenwald THE OAK GROVE SCHOOL Demopolis A lmost eight decades have passed since Charles S. Foreman Sr. entered the first grade in Gallion, Alabama, a Black Belt farm community in Hale County, about a half hour east of Demopolis. At first, he went to school in a church—Oak Grove Baptist, where his great-grandfather, a former slave, had been the first minister—and the church pews and aisles, he recalls , were the crowded classroom. As was often the case in the South, rural blacks went to school where they could—churches, shacks, barns, tumbledown schoolhouses—learning their ABCs in the months between planting and picking. And young Foreman, the son of tenant farmers, was no exception. As Booker T. Washington lamented in 1914 in Outlook magazine: “More money is paid for Negro convicts than for Negro teachers in Alabama,” offering up Wilcox County, Alabama, as an example, saying that “per capita expenditure for education in 1912 was $17 for whites as against 37 cents for Negroes .” In the state of Mississippi in 1912, Washington had said, 64 percent of the black children in the state had attended no public school whatsoever. By 1925, when Foreman was 8, though, he looked across a field next to Oak Grove Church and saw an edifice being erected with tall, white-washed walls, high windows to gather the sun, and a shiny tin roof. It was a Rosenwald School. “It was nice,” Foreman, 85, recalls with a smile. Oak Grove would become one of nearly 400 Rosenwald schools in Alabama RESTORING ROSENWALD 171 and more than 5,000 throughout the South and Southwest. Built along strict specifications and varying by size, the grammar schools took their name from Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Today, the remaining Rosenwald schools are considered among the nation ’s most endangered historic sites. In 1925, while Foreman did not know what “Rosenwald School” meant— his school continued to go by the name, Oak Grove, as it does today as a historic site and museum—he did know that his community had played a large part in creating it. Land that had come down from his minister great-grandfather, Darby Willis , had been donated for the school. Funds had been raised, in part, by his family and others in Gallion. They sold chickens and eggs and used part of their income as tenant farmers to invest in the school. Charles Forman Sr. sits in an old school chair inside Oak Grove School, a Rosenwald School near Gallion, Alabama, in rural Hale County. Foreman attended the school in the 1930s from the first to sixth grades. Photo by Mike Kittrell, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. 172 DOWN BACK ROADS Soon, after traipsing the roadside every morning with dozens of other children , Foreman entered not the church but the new building. “It was so different ,” he says. “It even had doors, so you could close off different rooms!” In one room were the first through third grades; in the other, fourth through sixth. There was a kitchen, a cloakroom, even, he remembers, a stage. The school day began with “a prayer circle,” then proceeded to lessons taught by women teachers—graduates, he says, of Alabama State. To back up the teacher’s word, a switch waited on the wall. One day, he says, the county agent came and gave a talk, and Foreman began to learn of the origins of the school and the two strikingly different men whose friendship had given rise to it: the black educator Booker T. Washington and the Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Foreman would go on to his own successes, including graduation from Tuskegee Institute, which Washington founded in 1881. Foreman studied agriculture , attaining a position as a county extension agent, and later earned the distinction of becoming Marengo County’s first registered black voter and serving as a local school board chairman. “It’s important for me to preserve Oak Grove School,” he explains, echoing the sentiments of other family members from Gallion. “It was my start.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation, headquartered in Washington , D.C., named the Rosenwald schools, as a group, one of the eleven endangered historic sites in the United States for 2002–2003. Five of Alabama’s remaining Rosenwald schools, including Oak Grove, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As National Trust president Richard Moe has stated: “In a time of...