The new bio-doc Rosenwald by Aviva Kempner details the life of Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932), who was born a year into the Civil War and died in the last year of the Hoover presidency. Rosenwald, which runs 90 minutes, is a conventionally serious "talking heads" documentary, the kind that's usually consigned to a late-night time slot on the public-TV station.
Director Kempner's thesis is that Julius Rosenwald, or "JR" as he preferred to be known, lived two lives: one as the hard-driving co-founder of the great Sears Roebuck chain of dry goods stores, which would outgrow its humble trading-post origins and become a huge retailer where any product imaginable could be ordered through its ubiquitous home-shopper's catalogues. The other side of Julius Rosenwald was an openhearted philanthropist who, over several decades, dispensed a small fortune as seed money designed to open up opportunities for millions of black Americans living under the yoke of the Jim Crow segregation codes. These were racist statutes drawn up to prevent African Americans from voting, working or exercising any of the rights and opportunities the average white American regarded as their birthright, opportunities also available to the millions of immigrants pouring into this country from poor Jewish communities across the Old World.
JR's big breakthrough, the moment that makes him a cultural hero, was his partnership with the great black educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). Considered in his lifetime to be the now highly ironic "credit to his race," Washington was a forward-thinking leader for his time. Born a slave, he taught the principles of black economic enterprise as a way of advancing the cause of his people. Partially under Washington's sway, Rosenwald offered seed money to build a network of one-room schoolhouses. Eventually over 5,400 such academies were established to provide basic education for hundreds of thousands of children through black communities in the South.
The Rosenwald Fund increased its charitable givings to include the construction of YMCAs and garden-style apartments for black Americans who had been raised in rundown sharecropper's shacks, living symbols of the tyranny of Jim Crow. The Rosenwald Fund also became an instrument to facilitate the Great Migration of poor rural blacks from the rural South to sections of the great Northern cities: Chicago's South Side, New York's Harlem, Los Angeles' Watts.
The final act of Rosenwald elaborates on JR's most lasting legacy, the funds that went to encourage the 1920s-era "Harlem Renaissance" that saw the creation of an African American artistic community, the so-called "talented 10th," individuals such as Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, a progression that would eventually witness the emergence of black queer-identified writers such as the brilliant essay-writer/novelist James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country). Ultimately Rosenwald is a rich tapestry, the story of how one man's vision became the basis for a chain of human endeavor extending as far as Stonewall. One of the virtues of this community biography is to hear Rosenwald extolled by a range of successful African American citizens such as filmmaker Gordon Parks, civil rights leaders Julian Bond and Ben Jealous, Congressman John Lewis, columnists Eugene Robinson and Clarence Page, National Public Radio reporter Cokie Roberts, Rabbi David Saperstein, writer Maya Angelou and director George C. Wolfe. (Opens Friday at Landmark Theatres.)