The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum is featuring a new special exhibition, A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America, open to the public from March 7 through August 17, 2025.
Discover one of the most transformative initiatives in American history forged by Booker T. Washington, a Black educator, author, and reformer, and Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish businessman and philanthropist. Between 1912 and 1937, their ambitious program partnered with local communities to build thousands of schools for Black children across the segregated South and Southwest. These schools countered the deep educational disparities of Jim Crow, had a profound impact on our nation, and fostered the generation who became civil rights leaders and activists.
Of the original 4,978 Rosenwald schools, only about 500 survive, relics of a time when school segregation was legal. Photographer Andrew Feiler was inspired to tell this remarkable history through photographs and stories, A Better Life for Their Children. The exhibition features images that capture these schools as they are today. Through portraits and stories from cities and towns in Texas and throughout the South, Feiler showcases the schoolhouses and the people for whom they meant so much.
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