The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement

William James Edwards was born enslaved in Alabama near the end of the Civil War. As a boy, he became sick with an illness that caused parts of his bones to die. He was unable to walk for a time and lived with his aunt and her children. His aunt was poor, and William rarely had enough to eat. He knew that taking care of him was a struggle for her, and one day, he sat under a tree, praying that he would die and no longer be a burden. Instead of dying, William began to recover. The next year, his aunt sent him to a better doctor, who gave him medicine and care even when he had no money. William underwent a number of operations, and after four years, he was well enough to pick cotton. With his cotton money, he saved enough to attend Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute to become a teacher.

Sometime around 1900, William was introduced to Anna Thomas Jeanes. When he told her the story of his childhood illness and his “vision to build a beautiful school” in his hometown of Snow Hill, Alabama (157), Anna wrote him a check for $5,000, or around $186,000 in today’s money.

By then, Anna was elderly and suffering from cancer. Living in a simple room in a boarding house for Quaker seniors, she often refused visitors, but she did want to see William. She was “deeply interested” in his work with rural African American schools and wanted to establish a fund to support them. She wanted William to set up a meeting with Booker and Hollis Frissell, two prominent Black educators. Her support was different from that of other Northern philanthropists, as she was nearing the end of her life and “did not have the motivation of preparing a workforce or keeping people in a position of subservience” (158). She genuinely wanted to help and did not interfere with William’s vision. Anna died in 1907 after “a seemingly quiet life” (159). However, McMahon writes that “quiet lives can sometimes leave the loudest echoes” (159). When she passed away, Anna left more than $33 million dollars in modern money to be used by rural Black schools throughout the South. She had made sure that the fund’s governing board was of mixed race so that “people could decide for themselves what their community needed” (159).

Nevertheless, plans for the education of Black children at the start of the 20th century included no talk of racial equality or desegregation. Today, many accuse Booker T. Washington of perpetuating white supremacy by encouraging Black people to act “the way that white people wanted them to” (160). These opinions are true and valid, but in McMahon’s view, they don’t capture the full picture. Within the context of the turn of the century, Booker and Anna did what they felt would have the greatest positive impact, working with limited options for educating the children and grandchildren of formerly enslaved people.

Anna’s money went to “Jeanes teachers” like Virginia Randolph, who traveled across their districts, training other teachers, organizing lessons, and seeing to community needs. The program continued until the 1970s, but the teachers’ “working environment” began to change with the start of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. The teachers were often harassed when traveling by public transportation, and some lost their jobs when states decided to close schools rather than integrate.

Julius Rosenwald, whom McMahon refers to as “JR,” was born to Jewish immigrants in Illinois in 1862. After two years of high school, he moved to New York and began selling suits, discovering a talent for sales. 

Meanwhile, a young man named Richard Sears found an abandoned box of gold watches on a train. Using his “charm” and “youthful face,” Richard quickly sold the watches and turned a profit. Railroads were making mail-order shopping feasible for the first time, and Richard realized that he was on the brink of a profitable business. He moved to Chicago to be near the railroad hub and developed a mail-order catalog. It was “Amazon before Amazon existed,” and Sears, Roebuck & Co. became “the stuff of retail legend” (167). However, Richard needed someone with capital to invest. Aaron Nusbaum had become unexpectedly wealthy when he provided soft drinks for the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Richard offered him a share in the company. Aaron hesitated, but his brother-in-law, Julius, agreed to split the cost of the partnership.

Soon, the company was flourishing, and the new concept of mail-order shopping “was unintentionally undermining white supremacy” (170). In many parts of rural America, white shopkeepers at small general stores could refuse to give Black patrons goods at any time. Now, Black shoppers were ordering things by mail. However, white shopkeepers began catching on and refused to sell Black people stamps or began throwing their mail away instead of sending it. To prevent this, Sears began providing pre-paid cards that customers could give directly to the letter carrier. In retaliation, white shopkeepers accused Sears of being Black owned, hoping that white supremacists would boycott the company.

Nevertheless, Sears continued to grow, even as there was trouble among the partners. Aaron left the company due to disagreements with Richard, and Richard himself left due to health problems, leaving Julius “solely in charge of the world’s largest retailer” (171). Julius became extremely wealthy and gave money to a number of causes, including Jewish charities and the development of the YMCA. However, as Julius neared his 50th birthday, “he was about to fundamentally change America” (171).

Born to an enslaved mother and an unidentified white father, Booker had no last name. His family was emancipated following the Civil War but remained desperately poor, and when he was young, he was forced to work instead of attending school. When he was nine, he enrolled in school and gave himself the last name of Washington. At 16, he learned about the Hampton Industrial and Normal School in Virginia and immediately wanted to enroll. He saved his pennies but still couldn’t afford a train ticket from his home in West Virginia. Instead, he hitched rides, worked for food, and walked most of the 400-mile journey.

Upon arrival, the white woman in charge of the school asked Booker to clean a classroom to test his willingness to work hard. After cleaning the room fastidiously three times, Booker was admitted to the school and given a job as a janitor to pay his tuition.

The Hampton Industrial and Normal School was founded by Samuel Armstrong, who commanded all-Black regiments for the Union Army. He noticed the lack of literacy among his troops and knew that it “was not because of a lack of ability” (174), but rather due to hundreds of years of enslavement without access to education. After the war, Samuel established a vocational school for African Americans. He was impressed with Booker’s dedication and with his philosophy that “white people should be responsible to help guide the formerly enslaved” (174). Despite his support for Black education, Samuel was far from an unequivocal champion of racial justice: He didn’t believe that Black people should be allowed to vote or hold public office “until whites could steer them into the kind of moral framework they believed would benefit them” (175).

In 1881, Samuel sent Booker to Alabama to head a new Black industrial school. In Tuskegee, Booker found that the school had to be built from the ground up, and he had to raise all the money himself. This took years, and along the way, Booker wrote an autobiography that inspired Julius Rosenwald. Julius and Booker met in 1911, and after this first meeting, Julius visited Booker’s school in Tuskegee. Impressed, Julius agreed to join the board and make donations. As his Sears company continued to thrive, Julius decided to celebrate his 50th birthday by giving away some of his “vast” fortune. Booker proposed a series of matching grants for rural schools across the South. He knew that state governments wouldn’t contribute to building Black schools; instead, communities would raise the money themselves and, therefore, be invested in maintaining their schools.

Julius approved the plan, and over the next 20 years, his money went to building almost 5,000 schools across the United States. Communities across the country made incredible “human sacrifices” to raise money for their schools, with the poorest giving mere pennies. Although Julius might get the credit for giving millions of dollars to the project, these small gifts were no less important.

These schools had a huge impact and educated hundreds of thousands of African American children. The education that those children received also affected their immediate families, their future children and grandchildren, and the entire community, making the true impact incalculable. The schools were still segregated and unequal, but they “change[d] the course of history in an imperfect way” (182). These schools educated icons like John Lewis and Maya Angelou, who would go on to fight for equality in the civil rights movement.

Julius continued to distribute money, giving away the equivalent of a billion dollars in today’s money before he died in 1932. His money went to a number of causes, including rebuilding Virginia Randolph’s school after it was destroyed in a fire.