Newell Rosenwald School
(ca. 1929)
One of Mecklenburg County’s six surviving Rosenwald schools, the Newell Rosenwald School educated generations of African American children while symbolizing local resistance to segregation.
1204 Torrence Grove Church Rd, Charlotte, NC 28213
As the result of early twentieth-century Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies, African American children across the United States suffered vast disparities in educational opportunities. Segregated public schools for African American students were often inferior to and lacked the services and facilities of schools for White children, creating roadblocks for social mobility and equal opportunity. In response, Sears-Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald and Tuskegee Institute founder Dr. Booker T. Washington formed a collaborative effort to improve public elementary education for rural Black students. From the 1910s to the 1930s, the Julius Rosenwald Fund operated as a unique and successful private/public partnership. The Fund combatted educational inequalities by aiding in the construction of approximately 5,400 public schools for African American children, including 813 Rosenwald schools in North Carolina (the most in the nation). Of the twenty-six Rosenwald schools built in Mecklenburg County between 1918 and 1929, the Newell school is one of only six that remains.
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The Newell Rosenwald School is located within the unincorporated village of Newell, one of several Mecklenburg County farm villages that sprang up along the new railroad lines in the second half of the nineteenth century. Enough Black residents lived in the predominantly White community to warrant their own church. Torrence Grove A.M.E. Zion Church erected its sanctuary in 1894.
The fundraising, location, and construction of many Rosenwald Schools was driven by local African American church congregations. Such was the case with the Newell Rosenwald School and Torrence Grove A.M.E. Zion Church. The church began fundraising for the school in 1922. In February 1928, the Mecklenburg County School Board purchased a 1.8-acre site adjacent to the church from Sarah P. Newell for $200. The school was built with three classrooms and an “industrial room,” where such practical skills as cooking and woodworking were taught. Like most Rosenwald schools, the Newell school lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, services largely unavailable in rural Mecklenburg County at the time. Accordingly, the Newell school featured large windows to maximize natural light during the school day and an outdoor privy.
By 1938, the Newell school was a four-person operation. Teachers Creola Moore, Beatrice Johnson Brown, and Abiah L. Miller Winston reported to principal A.F. Corley. In 1952, as part of the school board’s consolidation of the county’s numerous smaller rural schools into larger, more economically viable schools, the Newell school was closed, its students were merged into the Clear Creek (later J.H. Gunn) School, and the Rosenwald building was sold. In the 1980s, the building became the lodge hall for the Silverset Lodge #327, Free and Accepted Masons, part of the predominantly Black Prince Hall branch of the international Masonic organization. The building still stands next to the old cemetery and the rebuilt sanctuary of Torrence Grove Church.