After years of planning, fundraising and restoration work, the Williams Memorial Rosenwald School finally reopened its doors to the people of St. George this summer. Shuttered and decaying for almost 50 years, the six-classroom building was brought back to life by local alumni and supporters to serve as a community center and children’s museum.
The school now stands as a living history lesson. Its creation in 1925 and salvation in recent years are both testaments to this rural community’s activism and commitment to education—principles that are at the heart of the electric cooperative movement as well.
Let’s go back to the early 1900s. After reading Booker T. Washington’s seminal autobiography Up From Slavery and accompanying him on an illuminating trip to Alabama, Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald recognized the injustice that black children in the rural South lacked access to a proper education. Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., then partnered with Washington to build nearly 5,000 schools across the South between 1912–37. Their effort is considered one of the most effective philanthropic initiatives of the early 20th century.
Over several decades, Rosenwald schools educated about one-third of the country’s African American students. These schools dramatically narrowed the once-cavernous academic achievement gap between black and white students. They equipped a generation of African Americans with vocational and agricultural skills as well as a desire to pursue higher education. Many leaders of the Civil Rights movement, including the late Rep. John Lewis and poet Maya Angelou, grew up attending Rosenwald schools.
These schools were community owned and operated. Families in St. George and across the South wanted a better future for their children, so they did something about it. The Rosenwald Fund agreed to pay for a portion of each school. But communities like St. George had to come up with the rest of the money. And they did. Often, parents pitched in their own money so their children could have an education.
Once the schools were built, even the students contributed. They helped run the schools by chopping firewood, cooking, cleaning and doing other various jobs.
Not long after the Rosenwald school campaign came a similar movement—the push for rural electrification. Even in the 1930s, more than 98% of rural South Carolinians had no access to electricity, including many of the families that sent their children to Rosenwald schools.
But folks desperately wanted electricity, knowing how much it would improve life for themselves and their children.
In every electric cooperative’s origin story are tales of community leaders walking from house to house to raise the seed money that was necessary to form the cooperative and purchase poles and electric wire. Some lent their neighbors the money they needed to join the cooperative. Some helped build the lines, dragging poles across the land with their mules. They worked together to forever change their community.
When the lights came on at last, the cooperative movement began to narrow the significant economic, education and cultural gaps that had existed for years between city folks and people who lived out in the country. Take Hilton Head, for example. For-profit utilities wanted nothing to do with the sleepy island of 30 or so families back in the mid-1900s. Now, Hilton Head is a bustling bastion of South Carolina’s tourism industry, thanks to Palmetto Electric Cooperative.
It makes sense that when St. George’s Rosenwald school finally reopened its doors last month, cooperative leaders from across South Carolina were on hand to celebrate the occasion. For one, Doug Reeves, chairman of Edisto Electric Cooperative’s board of trustees, had helped lead the years-long effort to restore the school.
But we celebrate the Rosenwald school movement in part because it reminds us of what makes electric cooperatives special. It shows how much people can accomplish when they work together cooperatively to improve their communities.
I take comfort in knowing that as long as there are electric cooperatives, there will be co-op people who come together to do just that.
Mike Couick is the president and CEO of The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, Inc., the statewide association of not-for-profit electric cooperatives.
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St. George Rosenwald School—With a little help from S.C. electric cooperatives, restoration of South Carolina’s largest Rosenwald School enters the final phase.