Meet your neighbors update: Aviva Kempner’s latest work in progress

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington in 1917.

The Rosenwald Schools by Forest Hills resident and talented filmmaker Aviva Kempner, is an inspiring documentary about how Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the son of an immigrant peddler who rose to head Sears, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build 5,400 schools in African American communities in the early 1900s. This partnership benefited over 660,000 African American school children during the hardships of the Jim Crow era. The attempts to restore these schools is a great dramatic story.

Scrabble School, Rapahannock County, VA, before renovation. (Courtesy of National Trust for Historic Preservation. Photo by Crista Gibbons)

Rosenwald also built YMCAs and housing for African Americans to address the pressing needs of the Great Migration. And his Rosenwald Fund supported great artisans like Marian Anderson, Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, and Jacob Lawrence.

Among those interviewed are civil rights leaders Julian Bond, Ben Jealous and Congressman John Lewis, columnists Eugene Robinson and Clarence Page, television commentator Cokie Roberts, Rabbi David Saperstein, Rosenwald school alumni writer Maya Angelou, director George C. Wolfe and Rosenwald relatives.

View this 5-minute excerpt of a lecture by Rosenwald’s grandson to get a taste of this inspiring story.

People are welcome to host parlor parties to raise funds to complete the movie, and receive credit in the film. The Rosenwald Schools will be shown early next year at the 25th annual Washington Jewish Film Festival, which was founded by Kempner. The commercial run is targeted to start in early spring.

For more information, visit rosenwaldschoolsfilm.org.

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