NPR – Gabrielle Emanuel
“Just off the Old Dixie Highway in Northwest Georgia, a white building stands proudly on a hilltop. “To me, it looks like a church,” says Marian Coleman, who has taken care of this building for some 20 years. She stands out front, looking up at the gleaming paint, the big windows and the pointed roof. It never was a church. Instead, it was a two-room schoolhouse. This school was part of a massive school-building initiative that swept the South a century ago. Over the course of two decades, nearly 5,000 schools were built — schools for rural black children. These were public schools, but there was one man who bankrolled them: a Chicagoan named Julius Rosenwald. His name has largely been lost to history and so have the schools he built. But some economists think they hold important lessons for the world of today.”(more)