The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of “culture” because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both reason and civilization. Performance in print earned the laurel of humanity. Consequently, for well over 200 years, the African-American literary tradition has been defined as one in which books talked and a few slave authors achieved, at once, voice and significance by making a book talk back by writing.

During and after the American Civil War, individual state governments, faced with numerous economic demands, struggled to meet the needs of soldiers and their families. Among other pressing questions, they had to decide what to do with the massive number of dependent children orphaned by the war. Pennsylvania, a state that contributed the second most soldiers to the Union cause (only New York contributed more) suffered heavy losses. More than 15,000 Pennsylvania soldiers died in battle or of mortally inflicted battlefield wounds during the conflict. When one factored in death from disease and other causes, the number of Pennsylvania casualties exceeded 33,000. In addition to those who died, many others had their lives shortened by wartime injuries and diseases. Thousands more Pennsylvania soldiers survived the battle and its aftermath, but suffered severe injuries and were left too disabled to work. As a result, an unprecedented number of children became either full orphans or half orphans (those with mothers still living) or lived in families without adequate income to support them.

On Tuesday morning, May 1, 1928, Frank Callen, an African-American Superintendent of the Boys' Club of Savannah, came to the podium and stood before a sea of his white colleagues at the 22nd Annual Convention of the Boys' Club Federation in Birmingham, Alabama. Convention advertisements called boys' workers to the “Sunny South” through tales of fried chicken, hot biscuits served with the nectar from Alabama clover, and a region called Dixie that was “twice as nice as paradise.” The Federation had selected Birmingham as the site for its inaugural convention in the South to kick off their efforts to expand the number of Clubs in this region. Since its inception in 1906, the Clubs within the Federation had primarily provided service to white immigrant boys in the urban northeast, but this was rapidly changing as the number of Clubs in African-American communities had steadily risen over the last six years.

On June 2, 1947, British Columbia Indian Agent F. Earl Anfield requested that the Prince Rupert Board of Trustees allow the seventeen children of Port Essington Indian Day School to attend Port Essington Elementary at an annual cost to federal authorities of $65.00 per child. The trustees' approval of the request led to the permanent closure of the fifty-eight-year-old Methodist-established day school and marked British Columbia's first large-scale integration initiative. The event would not have been significant were it not for the fact it occurred two years before the passage of provincial legislation—and four years before federal legislation—that would enable it.

This essay reviews two books on Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund and places them within the historiography of the Fund. Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, is a biography written by Peter M. Ascoli. The book entitled The Rosenwald Schools of the American South written by Mary S. Hoffschwelle is a study of the rural school-building program with which the Fund is most closely associated. Ascoli's biography joins three other new biographies of early philanthropists that were published in 2006: David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie; Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America by Ruth R. Crocker; and David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life (Katz, p. B6).