Camp Parole Rosenwald School gets historic marker: ‘Where the head and the heart built heroes’

From the outside, the modest yellow-sided house at the corner of Hicks and Dorsey avenues in Annapolis is exactly what it looks like: a private residential unit.

But in spite of its unassuming facade, the long-standing dwelling holds a storied legacy as the Camp Parole Rosenwald School, one of nearly two dozen schools built for African-American children in Anne Arundel County during segregation.

“[It’s] where the head and the heart built heroes,” Annapolis Alderman Rhonda Pindell Charles said Friday.

The head, she said, was Booker T. Washington, the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute. The heart came from Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist and part-owner of Sears and Roebuck Company. Both men were instrumental in starting the schools. The heroes it produced are the scores of African-Americans who attended the school from its founding in 1923 through the end of segregation in 1954, many of whom are still alive today.

Now, a newly unveiled historic marker mounted outside the structure commemorates its lasting impact as one of thousands of Rosenwald Schools that advanced public education for African-American youth.

The site holds special meaning for Pindell Charles, whose father attended Camp Parole. The school’s name was drawn from the Civil War camp of the same name near Annapolis, which accepted paroled Union prisoners of war until they were exchanged for Confederate prisoners confined in the south. When the camp was torn down, Pindell Charles said, many African-Americans used the wood from the site to build homes in the Parole community off West Street. Her mother attended a Rosenwald School in northern Anne Arundel County.

To Alice K. Wright, who attended Camp Parole, it was the teachers who made a difference.

“They taught us discipline, respect, love for the community, but most of all, they prepared us for the future. I thank God for those teachers,” she said. “Because of those teachers giving us a beginning, a start, I am here where I am today because of the education that was given to us back in the day.”

Though Rosenwald didn’t graduate high school, his success as a businessman enabled him to participate in philanthropic causes. A meeting with Washington in 1911 led to his donation of $25,000 to the Tuskegee Institute in 1912, a portion of which was put toward the building of six small schools in Alabama.

Five years later, the Julius Rosenwald Fund was established, at first as a philanthropic foundation that later focused on funding schoolhouses in rural areas throughout southern states. Between 1917 and 1932, more than 5,300 Rosenwald Schools were built across the country. Only 10 percent of the schools remain standing today.

The schoolhouses all shared a similar blueprint — north or south-facing buildings to maximize natural light without electricity, cream or eggshell-colored paint on the walls to encourage learning and plain exteriors to help the schools avoid unwanted attention.

Rosenwald Schools were rendered obsolete in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. May 17 marks 70 years since the landmark decision.

Anne Arundel County was home to 23 Rosenwald Schools, 12 of which remain standing today, said Jane Cox, the administrator of the county’s historic preservation program. Most of the school sites throughout Anne Arundel County now have historical markers.

Several of the county’s former Rosenwald School sites have been converted for different purposes. In south county, one is now the Galesville Community Center.

Though Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley spoke of the Rosenwald Schools’ impact on educating African-Americans in the early 20th century, he also acknowledged their birth was from an unequal system.

“Recognizing that history helps us understand it was wrong,” he said. “Recognizing our history, even the ugly parts, helps us move forward together as a nation.”

Anne Arundel County also has more standing Rosenwald schools than any other state — something that state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat from Annapolis, credits to Rosenwald, Washington and the community’s fight to preserve its history and celebrate it for generations to come.

“That vision and that seed that was planted had so many blossoms and so many trees and so much fruit in each of our communities,” she said, “and that is why it’s important that we’re here today … because we cannot see where we need to go if we have not recognized where we came from.”