Richard Sears, a gifted advertising writer but chronically disorganized entrepreneur, had a tiger by the tail as he struggled to fill mail orders at his booming new company Sears, Roebuck. Julius got a chance to buy a quarter of the company, and soon he was imposing order on the shipping-room chaos.

Sears was the Amazon.com of its day, and Rosenwald had to take extraordinary measures to keep up with its growth. He put 7,000 laborers to work day and night building a huge warehouse. Special machines were made that could open letters at the rate of 27,000 per hour. A system of conveyor belts, pneumatic tubes, and color-coded tags shunted merchandise through the vast new plant. Henry Ford reportedly visited and absorbed ideas for his future assembly line. Management expert Peter Drucker later characterized Rosenwald as “the father . . . of the distribution revolution which has changed the world economy in the twentieth century and which is so vital a factor in economic growth.”

When the dust settled around the end of 1908, Sears was one of the most popular enterprises in the country, with millions of customers and tens of thousands of employees, and Rosenwald was its president and a multimillionaire. With the company on an even keel, his attention turned rapidly toward philanthropy. Soon he was giving away money with at least as much gusto as he poured into earning it.

Rosenwald School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For Individual schools named Rosenwald School, see List of Rosenwald schools.

In informal usage, a Rosenwald School was any of the over five thousand schools, shops, and teachers' homes in the United States which were built primarily for the education of African-American children in the South in the early 20th century. The project was the product of the partnership of Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish American clothier who became part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck and Company and the African American leader Booker T. Washington.[1]

The need arose from the chronic underfunding of public education for African-American children in the South, as black people had been disenfranchised at the turn of the century and excluded from the political system in that region. Children were required to attend racially segregated schools.

Rosenwald was the founder of The Rosenwald Fund. He contributed seed money for many of the schools and other philanthropic causes, requiring local communities to raise matching funds to increase their commitment to these projects.

To promote collaboration between white and black citizens, Rosenwald required communities to commit public funds and/or labor to the schools, as well as to contribute additional cash donations. White school boards had to agree to operate and maintain the schools, and millions of dollars were raised by African-American rural communities across the South to fund better education for their children.