According to Fox Carolina, residents of Pelzer, South Carolina, have spent nearly a decade fighting to reclaim the land where the historic Chapman Grove School once stood. Named after local Black professor John Chapman, the Rosenwald School has long been in disrepair; however, the community has now successfully regained control of the property.
Rosenwald Schools were a network of over 5,000 schools, shops, and teacher homes built primarily for African American children in the South during the early 20th century.
In 2024, ironically, the same year that the Julius Rosenwald Schools National Historical Act was proposed in the U.S. House and a similar act was later proposed in the Senate, officials in Greenville County tried to sell the land, which was formally controlled by the Chapman Grove Community Club, to a developer. Members of Pelzer’s Black community were not having it and reformed the club, which had disbanded by the time the park ceded to the county and the club ceased to exist in 1990, to keep control of the land.
According to Charles Cureton, the grandson of John Chapman, “The contract was very clear. It was written that way. The architect from the early ’70s made it clear that if it wasn’t a park, it had to be reverted back.”
Although the land has now been preserved, the building is another story. Only a few of the school’s buildings, like the cannery, where, as its name suggests, students learned how to preserve food, and the dormitory, where teachers and students from out of town lived at one point, are still standing at the site.
Greenville County Councilman Rick Bradley, a resident of the city for the past 45 years, expressed surprise that portions of the school were still on the tract of land, as reported by Fox Carolina.
“I had no idea that was there!” Bradley said. “I knew New Pleasantburg Church was there, and I knew those buildings were there; and I’ve been here 45 years—two miles from there.”
Between 1912 and 1932, more than 5,300 school buildings
were constructed in Black communities across the American South through a collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, a noted philanthropist and the CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Co., and civil rights activist Booker T. Washington.However, after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ensured a path to desegregation, many of these schools in Black communities eventually became obsolete.
As Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum President and CEO Mary Pat Higgins told NBC 5 DFW, the schools are a reminder of the indignity of Jim Crow.
“So this was a time of Jim Crow laws in the South. Separate but equal was the rule of the law, and almost always, that was not equal…Just imagine what our country might be like today if those students hadn’t been educated. Some of the students that attended those schools were people like Maya Angelou and civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and John Lewis,” Higgins said.
According to The Children’s Defense Fund, although Rosenwald funded the schools, the impetus for establishing a school in the community rested with the Black residents themselves in these rural areas
. Those residents would often fundraise for the public funds required for the schools by selling chicken dinners, penny drives, or by putting back some of their money or cotton crop if they were sharecropping, to help support the school.Although the schools were relatively short-lived, they set the standard for the modern construction of public and private schools with their simple, clean design, which often afforded plenty of natural light via the large windows incorporated in their design.
Once built, they also functioned as a third space for Black communities. But, like the building in Pelzer, many of these buildings were either abandoned, demolished, or repurposed for use as Head Start classrooms or other community gathering spaces.
In a 2024 press release, Alan Spears, Senior Director of Cultural Resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, called for a national park site commemorating the work of Rosenwald, Washington, and Black communities across the American South.
“It is long past time for a national park site that tells this story of Jewish and Black leaders coming together to make our country a better place.” Spears said. “Across fifteen Southern states, Rosenwald schools provided Black Americans with a quality education at a time when separate but equal was the law of the land. These schools were the beating heart of their communities, helping equip a new generation of Black scholars, entrepreneurs, and future civil rights activists with the tools they needed to succeed in a country where the odds were stacked against them.”
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