Throughout my childhood, I heard the name Rosenwald. I knew of the Rosenwald Schools, almost 5,000 in number, distributed across the old South. Once, they educated one out of every three Black children in the region, including Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. I knew that the schools were synonymous with opportunity, advancement, and excellence.
But the man behind the schools? I hadn’t a clue who he was.
Decades later, after stints in law and finance and running a Harlem nonprofit, I found my own calling in philanthropy—and, as my fate would have it, I landed at one of the best-known philanthropies of them all, the venerable Rockefeller Foundation (established in 1913, around the time that Rosenwald started to build his schools).
And so I set out to rediscover Julius Rosenwald. He was born, I learned, in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s residence. His German Jewish immigrant parents manufactured uniforms for Union officers, and they raised their son in the Reform temple where his father served as president.
Together, they practiced a strand of socially conscious Judaism that emphasized the values of tzedakah, or “righteousness,” and tikkun olam, “repairing the world”—informed by the charge of Deuteronomy: Justice, justice shall you pursue.
After an apprenticeship in Manhattan’s garment district, Rosenwald settled in Chicago. There, he sold men’s suits and eventually, in 1895, invested $75,000 (nearly $3 million today) in a 50 percent ownership stake in one of his distributors—a fledgling business called Sears, Roebuck, and Company. (Notably, he bought out the Roebuck of Sears Roebuck.)
Rosenwald’s managerial and marketing ingenuity spurred the business to prodigious success, as America’s emerging middle class ordered clothing, kitchenware, and almost anything else they could imagine from the first mail-order catalog. One characteristic innovation from the young Rosenwald: printing a thicker catalog on smaller stock, so housewives would place it at the top of their pyramid of magazines in their kitchens or living rooms.
In 1906, Congress authorized, and the Post Office implemented, a new rural delivery service, which ushered in a consumer-goods revolution. No longer were farmers required to trek into town for their mail. Riding the wave, Sears quickly became, in its own words, “the world’s largest store”—the Amazon of its time. And in 1908, Rosenwald became the president of Sears, ultimately amassing one of American history’s great fortunes.
Rosenwald charted a middle course amid the extremes of the Gilded Age, steering between the gathering provocateurs who rejected capitalism on one side and the industrialists who exploited it on the other.