'I want them to be able not just to learn history but do history'
By SHARON KERR Staff Writer

Courtesy photo MARJORIE CHANCE tells JJHS student Jaclyn Myers how she began a scrapbook on the Kennedy assassination more than 40 years ago. Myers said, "I learned a great deal from Mr. (Herman) Wright about the types of questions that should be used while performing interviews." Junior high students are using a grant from The Long Black Line organization to record oral histories of Jasper County residents.

More than 5,000 Rosenwald schools were built from Maryland to Texas in the early part of the twentieth century. It's a story about immigrants, pioneers, former slaves and the desire to achieve the American dream.

It sounds like an epic Hollywood movie script; however, right now it is one part of a documentary by Herman Wright Jr. that chronicles The Long Black Line, a history of Wright's family and the freedom communities in Texas.

Wright is the son of Herman Wright, long-time Jasper school board member, businessman, and retired lieutenant colonel.

Growing up in a military family, Wright lived all over the world, but he spent his summers in Jasper County on the family ranch near Mt. Union. His grandmother and other relatives told him stories of the early pioneers and the hardships they endured, but he was an adult before he ever learned the significance of the old white school house.

Rosenwald Schools

Julius Rosenwald was a Jewish immigrant from Germany and one of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Co. He used his fortune to help remedy what he saw as one of America's most serious social situations, the chronic underfunding of education for African- American children in the south.

Rosenwald was impressed by Booker T. Washington and served many years with him on the board of directors for Tuskegee Institute. In Alabama, he began "to address the poor state of African American education" by building six schools in rural black communities.

Eventually, the Rosenwald Fund built 5,000 schools and several hundred teacher homes and shop buildings across 15 states in the years from 1917 to 1932.

Most of those buildings have been lost to time, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They list the Rosenwald school buildings as the 11th most endangered historic places in America.

As southern schools became integrated in the 1960's, most Rosenwald schools were abandoned. An old Rosenwald school on I-35 in East Columbia was only recently identified and restored; it was used as a hay barn for nearly 50 years.

Alice Rosenwald, a descendant of Julius, has begun a matching grant program to help identify and preserve the old schoolhouses. Jasper County has two Rosenwald schools, one at Huff Creek and another in Rock Hill.

To qualify for grants, the restored buildings must be open to the public. In other parts of the country, Rosenwald schools have been restored as museums or found second life as senior citizen centers or headstart schools.

$1 a week

The Rosenwald philanthropy has always hinged on communities putting up a portion of the money. Part of the original Rosenwald Fund program required each rural community to show their dedication to the importance of education by putting up seed money.

"Some of these people were one generation out from slavery," Wright said of his ancestors. "They came here with nothing. They were earning $1 a week cutting logs in the woods, yet they still managed to raise $100 to build a school."

Wright said his grandmother Arvetta Wright did not have much of an education, but she valued it.

"They always focused on the generation beyond. If they had a fifth or sixth grade education, they were the lucky ones. It's just incredible what they did," Wright said.

The Long Black Line

Wright began taping oral histories seven years ago. He didn't necessarily know how he would use the footage when he started; he just loved history and knew that if it was not recorded, it would be lost.

"When history disappears, a portion of the soul disappears," Wright told Landscapes magazine last year.

When he started the project, Wright was a successful marketing executive in the Los Angeles area, but he frequently returned to the family ranch founded by his great-grandfather, Benjamin Wright in 1874. The homestead has been certified by the Texas Department of Agriculture as a "Texas Historic Ranch" for being maintained in continuous agricultural operation by the same family for 100 years.

When his father died two years ago, Wright moved back to Texas and now shuttles between a home in Houston and the Mt. Union ranch.

His filmmaking company, MC3, is in the process of turning the oral histories into a documentary called The Long Black Line. A PBS station in Austin encouraged him to do it as a trilogy, The Building, The Bridge, and The Restoration.

The Old Testament book of Nehemiah, in which the Jews rebuilt Jerusalem after 70 years in captivity, inspired these names.

The JISD project

As Wright researched his family history with people like Bertie Bryant at the Old Jail Museum, he came across other families like the Wrights of Magnolia Springs, a white family.

He realized this is not a story of race, it's a story of all the people who came here in the 1800's, and all of their descendants have stories to tell.

Wright recently presented Jasper Junior High School with a check for $2,500 for Diane Pace's history class to buy camcorders so students can begin to collect oral histories of their own families.

"I want them to be able not just to learn history but do history," Wright said.