FL: Seminole Co. Pleased That Schools Are Now

[Rick Dean]

16

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/...dlines-seminole

Seminole says schools are finally integrated

Agreement may end 35 years' federal oversight

By Dave Weber | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted March 30, 2004


SANFORD -- When the U.S. government stepped in to demand integration of schools, no one in Seminole County dreamed it would take so long. Now, after almost 35 years of federal oversight, officials say the racism that was woven into the school system is gone.

On Monday, the School Board unanimously approved an agreement negotiated with the Department of Justice that would end court oversight of school desegregation, possibly within a few months.

Velma Williams, a Sanford city commissioner who graduated from the all-black Crooms Academy in 1959, remembers studying from torn, cast-off textbooks in shabby classrooms.

"There has been tremendous progress," said Williams, a retired Seminole Community College administrator.

"But I still have concerns. We still have to be vigilant."

While the School Board of 1970 fought integration, today's board members welcomed and praised it.

"Seminole County has come so far," School Board member Dede Schaffner said. "We have opened so many doors for so many children."

Seminole is one of several districts in Florida, including Orange, still under court desegregation orders. Orange also is seeking release from court review of its racial practices in the schools.

While Seminole is under the order, it needs court approval for changes in everything from student, faculty and staff assignments to facilities, student transportation and extracurricular activities. Every decision that affects racial makeup of the schools is weighed.

Seminole struggled to meet a series of court decrees aimed at ending
the segregation that had largely centered on Sanford schools.

The school district has been working since 1996 to be declared a "unitary" school district, one that shows no signs it once had separate schools for white and black students.

Folding black and white schools into a single "unitary" school system turned out to be complex from the beginning. It involved far more than "mixing" two historically separate racial groups, as the language of the day described it.

For starters, the district had five predominantly all-black schools -- Goldsboro, Rosenwald, Hopper and Midway elementaries and Crooms High.

Some were quickly integrated after the federal government intervened in 1970, but six years into the process Midway still had only nine white students and 300 blacks, according to newspaper accounts.

Goldsboro remained 67 percent black as late as 1998, when it became a districtwide magnet school focusing on math, science and technology. An influx of other races has dropped black enrollment to 32 percent.

In addition to balancing racial makeup of the schools, everything from equity in classroom construction to makeup of the high school cheerleading squad had to be addressed as officials unraveled layer upon layer of discriminatory practices that seemed innocent to some and blatant to others.

Although the old Midway school building was improved over the years, it still does not compare with many other county facilities. Superintendent Bill Vogel said the district is committed to replacing it within two years.

Officials also continue to push for more black cheerleaders, more black students in gifted
and advanced classes and fewer discipline referrals for black students.

School district and federal officials agreed in the document approved by the board Monday that the Seminole County school district has "eliminated the vestiges of segregation to the extent practicable and demonstrated its good faith commitment to the constitutional rights of all students."

The agreement now goes to U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp, who will make the final decision whether the school district can be released from the desegregation order.

The School Board in 2000 agreed to additional concessions required by the Justice Department in order to get out from under federal supervision, and it adopted policies last year as commitment that it would not backslide if released from federal oversight.

Maree Sneed, a Washington, D.C. attorney representing the School Board in negotiations with the Department of Justice, said it will be up to school officials to prove that they are following the new policies. The district will make a series of reports to the community in coming years.

But board member Larry Furlong said the benefits of integration are clear, and educational opportunities for blacks and new prosperity for many are the proof.

"I don't think anyone wants to go back," Furlong said.

Dave Weber can be reached at dweber@orlandosentinel.com or
407-320-0915.


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[Arheel's Uncle]

The school district has been working since 1996 to be declared a "unitary" school district, one that shows no signs it once had separate schools for white and black students.

The Sears & Roebuck schools were all built especially for blacks who were already living in segregated areas.

For starters, the district had five predominantly all-black schools -- Goldsboro, Rosenwald, Hopper and Midway elementaries and Crooms High.

"[Sears & Roebuck's Jewish tycoon, Julius] Rosenwald died in 1932, and soon after his fund wound down—as he intended—leaving a legacy of 5,357 schoolhouses, shop buildings, and teachers’ homes across the South, from Florida to Maryland and Texas."

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Rosenwald schools which 5,357 were then built. After decades of little building maintenance in black communities, the schools fell into disrepair. Just like any area where the population is majority black, it all goes to s#it. The blacks were given over 5,300 schools, which were all stocked with books, etc.
The blacks complain, always trotting out their BS about getting old books, even if they were old books, the contents were standards.
The Topeka, Kansas study is always ignored. Majority of blacks did not want desegregation, the ones who did were involved with Jews.
DESEGREGATION CREATED HUGE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES FOR JEWS.
I believe the constant black complaints are just a cover for black low IQ, as more modern studies explained in The Bell Curve.
Constant change, especially radical change such as desegregation only covers up the real problems of low IQ and a black predisposition of, acting black.

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https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/culture/remembering-the-rosenwald-schools_o

Remembering the Rosenwald Schools​

How Julius Rosenwald and [black] Booker T. Washington created a thriving schoolhouse construction program for African Americans in the rural South.​

CIESLA Foundation
The renovated Ridgeley Rosenwald school in Capitol Heights, Md., now operating as a museum

Before there was Samuel Mockbee and Rural Studio, there was Julius Rosenwald. In the early 1900s, Rosenwald oversaw a self-help construction program for schoolhouses in the rural South. By 1928, one out of every five schools in the region was what became popularly known as a Rosenwald School.

Courtesy Special Collections Res
Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, circa 1915


Rosenwald was not an architect. He was a tycoon, the man who turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. from a small Chicago-based mail-order house into the largest merchandiser in the country. Like many American tycoons, he was a philanthropist. The son of poor German-Jewish immigrants—his father was a peddler—Rosenwald had experienced anti-Semitism, and he was particularly sensitive to the plight of black Americans. After reading Up from Slavery, he sought out Booker T. Washington and became a major benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The meeting of Rosenwald and Washington is a pivotal moment in a new documentary, released this summer, by the Washington, D.C.–based filmmaker Aviva Kempner, whose work includes Partisans of Vilna (1986) and the Emmy-nominated The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1998). Rosenwald, which premiered at New York City’s Center for Jewish History and was screened at the NAACP’s recent national convention in Philadelphia, is a Horatio Alger story of accomplishment, practical idealism, vile segregation, and self-help construction.

A Rosenwald school in Taylors, S.C., circa 1940

In 1912, in reaction to the substandard conditions of black rural schools in the Jim Crow South, Booker T. Washington enlisted his friend Rosenwald’s support in building six new schools for black children in Alabama. Rosenwald was so impressed with the results that he proposed enlarging the program. He first suggested that Sears could manufacture schools as prefabricated kits—similar to the famous Sears catalog homes—but Washington insisted that design and construction of the buildings should be handled locally, to guarantee the active involvement of the community. To that end, Rosenwald donated part of the cost of each building, requiring matching funds to be raised by local school boards and the black community.
As Booker T. Washington intended, the design and construction of the Rosenwald Schools were left to the local community, but guidance was provided in the form of technical advice and practical handbooks. In 1915, Tuskegee published The Negro Rural School and Its Relation to the Community, which included building designs by Robert Robinson Taylor. An architect and the first black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in 1892), Taylor designed more than 20 buildings on the Tuskegee campus. Following Washington’s strict self-help philosophy, these were built by the students themselves; student masons manufactured bricks, student carpenters felled trees and dressed lumber. Taylor was effectively the second-in-command at Tuskegee, but he was also responsible for a number of buildings at other southern black universities, as well as the impressive Renaissance Revival Colored Masonic Temple in Birmingham, Ala.

Fisk University; The Hickstown Rosenwald school in Durham County, N.C.


Booker T. Washington died only two years after the first rural schools were built, but the newly created Rosenwald Fund enabled the program to continue. Rosenwald relied on the advice of Fletcher Bascom Dresslar, a Berlin-trained professor of health education at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. Dresslar had definite ideas about architecture. He deplored “gingerbread stuff,” and especially disliked belfries—a staple of the traditional country schoolhouse. “Thus far the architects of the large majority of our smaller schools have clung tenaciously to the ‘schoolhouse type,’ and have given us, in the main, buildings devoid of any attempt at niceties of proportion or unity of design,” he wrote in his how-to guide, American Schoolhouses (1911).
Dresslar, who emphasized “beauty of proportion and fitness for use,” was a confirmed functionalist. But unlike the work of Rural Studio, which tends to be self-consciously avant-garde, the Rosenwald Schools were decidedly traditional in appearance: pitched roofs, deep overhangs, porches, and white-washed clapboard siding. The ordinariness was intentional. It made sense to follow well-understood building practices and to avoid needless complexity, because the schools were often built by unskilled volunteer labor. It also made sense to use an architectural language that was familiar to the users. Yet the completed buildings are not without art. Following Dresslar’s teaching, decorative trim was kept to a minimum, which gives these unadorned buildings a satisfying, Shaker-like simplicity.

A Rosenwald school in Alabama

The Rosenwald Schools may have looked traditional, but they incorporated many design innovations. The classrooms were often separated by movable partitions so they could be combined into one large space. The most common arrangement was two classrooms, an adjacent “industrial room” for shop and cooking classes, as well as vestibules and cloakrooms. (So-called community schools had more classrooms, and included an auditorium as well as a library.) Classrooms had tall ceilings and exceptionally large double-hung windows, typically arranged in batteries for maximum daylighting, which was crucial since many of the sites lacked electricity. East and west light was favored and building orientation was emphasized. “It is better to have proper lighting within the schoolroom, however, than to yield to the temptation to make a good show by having the long side face the road,” instructed the Tuskegee handbook. Cross-ventilation was facilitated by “breeze windows”—internal openings—and the buildings were raised off the ground on piers to facilitate cooling. This was green architecture by necessity.

©Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1928 design for a Rosenwald School

One should not imagine that Rosenwald was architecturally timid. He built the first Sears Tower, which was attached to a huge merchandise building that was known as “the world’s largest store.” When he conceived the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments in Chicago, intended for middle-class African Americans, he was inspired by a socialist housing project that he had seen in Vienna. His own home in Kenwood was a Prairie Style mansion designed by George C. Nimmons, who had apprenticed with Daniel Burnham.

One of Rosenwald’s friends and a fellow supporter of Tuskegee who was particularly interested in architecture was Darwin D. Martin of Buffalo, N.Y. Martin was a long-time patron of Frank Lloyd Wright (the Larkin Building, the Martin House), and in 1928 he convinced Wright to submit a design for a Rosenwald School. The site was the campus of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a historically black college (and Booker T. Washington’s alma mater). Wright dismissed Shaker-like simplicity as the “extreme of timidity,” and produced an unusual courtyard scheme. The courtyard, which included a swimming pool, was dominated by a tall children’s theater with balconies, a proscenium stage, and a fly tower. The classrooms were lit by east- and west-facing dormer windows. The unconventional construction of heavy concrete and fieldstone, which Wright would later use at Taliesin West in Arizona, was an odd choice for a Southern campus. “Never built. Not ‘Colonial,’ ” Wright scrawled on his study drawing. “Never built. Too expensive” was probably closer to the truth.

A 1932 map illustrating how widespread the schools were across the South
Rosenwald died in 1932, and soon after his fund wound down—as he intended—leaving a legacy of 5,357 schoolhouses, shop buildings, and teachers’ homes across the South, from Florida to Maryland and Texas. The reaction of white communities to Rosenwald Schools was predictable: a few cases of arson, occasional vandalism, and general neglect. Nevertheless, most of the schools remained in active use until the 1960s, when the desegregation mandated by Brown v. Board of Education went into effect. Several illustrious Rosenwald alumni are interviewed in Kempner’s film, including Maya Angelou, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

Earl Leatherberry via Flickr CreThe Russell School in Durham County, N.C., constructed according Rosenwald's two-teacher plan

Although more than two score Rosenwald Schools have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, many have been demolished or allowed to fall into disrepair. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is committed to preserving a hundred Rosenwald Schools and currently offers grants to assist in their rehabilitation. Restored, the buildings have found use as community centers, senior centers, town halls, and local museums.
The Rosenwald Schools recall the heroic efforts of exceptional individuals during a particularly dark period in the nation’s history. They are also a graphic reminder of a time when great philanthropy and architecture went hand in hand: Andrew Carnegie and his libraries; Andrew Mellon and the National Gallery of Art; Edward Harkness at Harvard and Yale; and, not least, Julius Rosenwald and his rural schoolhouses.