Were the schools separate? They were. Did JR and Booker T. Washington, who died partway through the project, try to create integrated facilities? No. They were working within the confines of an existing societal structure, believing that educating students had to be realistic. Were they equal? No. Did they still change the course of history in an imperfect way? Yes.
The Washington Post interviewed several people in Maryland who attended a Rosenwald school. LaVerne Gray said of her time there, “You were expected to grow up and be a credit to your race.”
Her cousin Corinthia Boone said, “Oh yes, you were expected to be somebody. Our teachers wanted us to be contributors to society.”
Maya Angelou recalled that the Rosenwald school she attended was “grand.”[22]
And so while the schools were not equal or integrated, many of the leaders of the civil rights movement were educated in Rosenwald schools. Without their ability to become educated, integration and equality under the law would not have occurred. Education was simply too powerful a weapon, and without the lift from JR, there is little chance that states would have allowed African Americans to wield it.
JR later established the Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, which awarded grants to talented African Americans. Winners include W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and John Hope Franklin. He also provided the major funding for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, conceived of during the time when Inez Milholland was kicking off her speaking tour for the National Woman’s Party.
The Palace of Fine Arts building, left over from the World’s Columbian Exhibition, was fortified and became the museum’s permanent home. He declined to have it called the Rosenwald Museum—in fact, he spent years trying to get them to rename the museum after people began to call it the Rosenwald Museum.
JR refused to tie up his fortune in vaults beneath the earth, restricted in perpetual endowments. He declined to drip it out slowly, like many of his predecessors. He came by his money by chance, by virtue of proximity, and the least he could do, he believed, was use it to improve the condition of another.
A man once asked JR, “Why are you doing so much to help the Negro?”
“I am interested in America,” he said. “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind.”[23]
In another address, JR said, “We whites of America must begin to realize that Booker T. Washington was right when he said it was impossible to hold a man in the gutter without staying there with him, because if you get up, he will get up. We do not want to remain in the gutter. We, therefore, must help the Negro to rise.”[24]
In his final letter to Julius before his death, Booker wrote:
My dear Mr. Rosenwald:
You do not know how grateful we are for the privilege of having some part in the expenditure of this money which is accomplishing so much good.
I often wish that you could have time to hear and see for yourself some of the little incidents that occur in connection with this work. I wish you could hear the expressions of approval that now come from white people—white people who a few years ago would not think of anything bearing upon Negro education. I wish you could hear the expressions of gratitude uttered over and over again by the most humble classes of colored people.
Let me repeat, that we count it a great privilege to have some little share in this glorious work.
I am planning to see you in Chicago sometime the first week in November and go over matters a little more in detail.
Yours very truly,
Booker T. Washington[25]
By the time Julius Rosenwald died in 1932, he had given away one billion dollars in today’s money. He left strict instructions that anything left of his foundation must be disbursed within twenty-five years of his death. Echoing the words of Virginia Randolph: now, he felt, is the best time to do the next needed thing.
When Virginia Randolph, the first Jeanes teacher, saw her life’s work go up in flames in 1929, it was the Julius Rosenwald Fund that gave some of the money to construct the new and bigger school out of brick.
Much of the rest was raised by her and the thriving community she had built.
Go for Broke
Eighteen
The InouyesHawaii, 1924
The baby was born dead. When the midwife who delivered him into a slum in 1924 couldn’t revive him, she pressed his father into service: “Bring ice water!” she yelled. The midwife held his lifeless blue body upside down, delivering several smacks to his backside. His mother was exhausted, but adrenaline now coursed through her veins. She sat upright. Fearful. Praying.
The new father thundered up the stairs, the bucket of icy water sloshing his ankles. The midwife dipped her fingers in and stroked the cold water across the baby’s forehead and neck, whispering life into his little ear. Then, incredibly, he began to cry.
His mother sank back into the bed pillows with relief. “Daniel,” she whispered, after the prophet who survived the lion’s den. His was a great courage, a courage that was steadfast. Too soon, her little son would have a chance to live up to his name.
Daniel’s family arrived in Hawaii from Japan in 1899, propelled by a debt they couldn’t pay. A fire had broken out at the Yokoyama home of his great-grandfather, Wasaburo, damaging the neighborhood. Together, the village elders decided Wasaburo must pay four hundred dollars to make the families who lost their homes whole again. It was a sum Wasaburo had no hope of earning in Japan, but not paying the debt—a matter of honor—was not even a consideration.[1]
There remained but one hope: Wasaburo’s oldest son, Asakichi, must leave the village in Japan and seek employment elsewhere. Recruiters were promising ten dollars a month for Japanese laborers to leave behind everything they knew and sail into the unknown, across the Pacific, to Hawaii.[2]
Asakichi and his wife left their two daughters in the care of his father, but they brought with them their young son, Hyotaro. They walked from their small village to Fukuoka City, where they caught a boat to Honolulu—an arduous voyage across the rolling sea. Fifteen days in cramped, contaminated quarters brought them to the bright green of the islands, the waters full of fish, the jungles full of fruit. Asakichi signed a five-year contract to work on a sugarcane plantation, hoping that his ten dollars per month in earnings would allow him to pay off his father’s debt by the end of the sixty months.[3]
But no matter how many fifteen-hour days Asakichi labored under the Hawaiian sun, his paychecks were meager. Credit at the company store was easy to use, and they were required to shop there. At the end of the month, they had only one, maybe two, dollars left to send back to Japan. By the end of the five years, only one quarter of the four-hundred-dollar debt had been paid. He had no choice but to sign a five-year employment extension.
Discouraged by the slow progress they were making on the debt and desperately missing their daughters, Asakichi began to ruminate on what else he could do to earn money. One morning, unable to sleep, his thoughts drifted to something else he missed from home: a warm bath. Here in the meager company housing, little better than hastily built shacks staked into Hawaii’s volcanic soil, there was no place for the luxury of a bathhouse.
He decided to build one. Soon, he was earning one penny per bath, each person getting five minutes to luxuriate in the warm water, wistfully thinking of the sights and smells of Japan and the people they missed from home. His wife was also enterprising. She missed tofu cakes, and took the profits from the baths to buy supplies so she could make and sell them. Asakichi rose at 2:00 a.m. each morning to earn extra money to pay off the debt of his father.
It took thirty years.
Their son, Hyotaro, was four when they were first assigned to a plantation on the island of Kauai. And as children are wont to do, the boy sprouted like sugarcane. Though Hyotaro wished he could attend school regularly, he learned in fits and starts, snatching a few weeks here and a few weeks there, working in the family businesses and the sugarcane fields. It took him eight years to finish elementary school. In order to pursue more schooling, he would have to leave the island, and he did: attending boarding school on the Big Island and high school in Honolulu. By the time he had completed his studies, he was twenty-five. Still, his family’s debt was not satisfied.
Hyotaro met a vivacious girl named Kame, an orphan who had been raised by Methodist missionaries, and they married. One year after they vowed to be faithful and true, baby Daniel was born. Dead, but raised to life by ice water and whispered prayers.[4]
Growing up, Daniel felt he was an ugly child—he described himself as having a massive head, with his face looking like a dark prune. When his mother’s adoptive parents saw him, they were allegedly so dumbstruck that all they could squeak out was, “Well, he has nice ears.” When he got a bit older, he got his hair shaved off in a style that matched his father and grandfather. His mother, irate at the sight of her son, who she felt most definitely should not be bald, scooped up the shorn hair, moaning at the sight of her firstborn. She fashioned a rudimentary wig out of the hair that moments ago had sprung from his scalp, and forced Daniel to wear it until the prickles of his new growth began to poke through. Daniel said he looked like an “owl-eyed dwarf” with his head shaved.[5]
Daniel Inouye was the first of four children, and when I say his family was poor, I mean his mother would cook one hardboiled egg for breakfast and split it six ways. But Daniel said it mattered little, because everyone else he knew was also poor. It wasn’t like he was the only child in his class without shoes—no one else wore them either, so he didn’t feel the sting of comparison until he was old enough to meet families who had more than his own.
Schools were de facto segregated in Hawaii. In 1853, 97 percent of Hawaii’s population was native. By 1923, only 16 percent of Hawaii was native, with massive influxes of foreign laborers brought from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Korea.[6] The economy on the islands was controlled by a handful of white families who dominated the sugar and fruit industries, driven by the world’s economic insatiability for what thrived in the gorgeous climate of the archipelago. Technically, the public schools were open to all and weren’t segregated by race, but instead, children were weeded out by language. These “English Standard” schools had admissions requirements, and children were expected to speak near-perfect English in order to attend.[7]
