Education: Rosenwald Results

"Negro children may be smar," said the late famed Negro Booker T. Washington, "but the white people of the South compliment them too much when they think they can learn in four months as much as white children can in nine."

Twenty years ago, Julius Rosenwald got busy with the profits from his Sears Roebuck catalog. Since then, $4,000,000 of his money plus more than $4,000,000 from innumerable Negroes plus $1,000,000 from Southern whites plus $18,000,000 of public funds has built 5,357 Negro schoolhouses in 15 Southern States, thereby doubling the number of schools for U. S. Negro moppets.

Last week, the Rosenwald Fund (reporting on its activities since the death of the creator in January 1932), announced that its school-building work was ended. But, said Reporter-President Edwin Rogers Embree, the cause of Negro education is far from won. Eight Southern States average $44 per year for a white child's education; $12.50 for a Negro's. Rosenwald Fund will henceforth concentrate on improving the quality of the 15,000 Negro teachers in the schools it built. Prime means: scholarships for promising individuals; and to the four centres of higher Negro education—in Washington, Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans.