Snow Hill Colored High School: A Rosenwald Fund School

This photograph of a Rosenwald Fund schoolhouse built in Snow Hill, North Carolina is in the Digital Collections of the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Caolina.

The partnership between educator Booker T. Washington and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald led to a movement to educate African American children in the early decades of the 20th century. Washington, founder and president of Tuskegee Institute, said that “black children’s schoolhouses were ‘not fit for pigs to live in.’ The Freedmen’s Bureau (1865-1872) provided some short-lived schooling for city-dwelling freedpeople; unfortunately, this didn’t help the majority of black families, who lived in rural areas.”

“In the South, it was also common for counties to steal revenue generated by black taxpayers and use it to fund white schools. To compensate, black communities often bore the burden of “double taxation”; in other words, an involuntary tax to the state, followed by a voluntary donation to their community.”

The above is excerpted from The Rosenwald Schools: A Story of How Black Communities Across the American South Took Education Into Their Own Hands.  The website includes maps, photographs, architectural plans, graphs of expenditures, etc.

[Note: What’s sometimes overlooked is that black communities raised money to match donations from the Rosenwald Fund — Leslie]

In 2017, efforts to restore the school building were reported by the local television station:
Zora Stephenson. “The East’s Hidden History: Snow Hill Colored School,”WNCT, 3 February 2017 (accessed February 22, 2021)
Tamara Scott. “Group aims to restore Snow Hill Colored School as African American Museum,” WNCT, 12 September 2017 (accessed February 22, 2021)

 

The compilation of North Carolina Roswenwald Schools Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, September 1, 2020 includes the Snow Hill Colored High School on page one. The entry has links to the NHRP application and a more recent photograph of the building above.