Although it’s hard to believe, it’s been more than a quarter century since I first walked into what is now the John Hope and Aurelia W. Franklin Library at Fisk University and stumbled onto my life’s work. I went to Special Collections hunting “good books” for a freshman paper and met the late Beth Madison Howse ’65, who gently pointed me to the stacked wooden card catalog. I earned a hard-won B—and then I kept coming back, so often I might have been the archives’ most frequent patron.
Across my years at Fisk, I watched—and, if I’m honest, probably pestered—scholars who made pilgrimages to our archives. Long after the university inventory became searchable online, a surprising number still discovered that to access one collection, truly—the Rosenwald School records—you had to do it the old way. Whether people emailed, phoned, or appeared in person, Beth met each request with the same grace. Her respect for the seekers was emblematic of the reverence she had not only for history, but for the human lives attached to it.
Under Ann Allen Shockley’s leadership, a young Beth Howse—working with Gracia Hardacre and Gilbert Belles—completed processing of the Rosenwald Fund Papers on December 19, 1969. Their meticulous work and finding aid became the backbone of everything we continue to build on today.
More than a decade after Beth’s passing, that painstaking care has been translated into a public digital bridge. Thanks to a $1.6 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation award, Fisk is launching the Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection portal—a living, growing archive that makes this history newly accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Why does this matter—especially to a higher-ed audience? Because the Rosenwald story is not mere nostalgia. Between 1913 and 1948, in partnership with Black communities across the South and with a model that required local sacrifice alongside philanthropic and state support, the Rosenwald Fund helped build more than 5,000 schools, teacher homes, and libraries. The records at Fisk—585 archival boxes and nearly 674,000 items, with over 40,000 digitized for launch—do more than map where those schools stood; they show how communities marshaled faith, strategy, and sweat to demand better futures for their children. They are a blueprint for institution-building and civic imagination—squarely at the heart of higher education.
Amid a culture when curriculum is contested and public memory is politicized, the Rosenwald portal is a quiet, radical act. It says: here are the documents, photographs, applications, index cards, and correspondence; here are the communities, named and legible; here is the evidence of what collective action can build. It invites faculty to bring primary sources into U.S. history, civics, geography, African American studies, archival studies, public policy, and even economics courses. It welcomes genealogists and descendants searching for the school their grandmother attended. It meets with community historians who have preserved stories in attics and church basements, and gives them a place to contribute. And, crucially, it trains Fisk students—who helped build the platform, structure the metadata, and improve open-source tools—to become stewards of memory and makers of access.
This is what fills me with personal, professional, and collective pride: the best part is that it has all been built in-house at Fisk by our team for a global audience. We’ve even contributed code improvements—such as a CSV/Zip importer that streamlines large uploads—so that peer institutions, especially historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and under-resourced archives, can bolster sustainable, standards-based portals of their own. We have the opportunity to introduce people from all walks of life to the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and to the possibilities of digital archives—and that feels like the work Fisk was always meant to do. Building capacity inside a historically-Black institution is not ancillary to the project; it is the project. As co-laborers in the cause of Black education, I hope HBCU researchers take special pride in their offerings.
As an alumna and advisory board member, I have watched the project leaders labor with a standard worthy of the collection. Project Director DeLisa Minor Harris, who also serves as the Director of Library Services, has insisted that “Fisk’s stewardship of the Rosenwald records are a part of our commitment to preserving African American history and making it available for future generations.” She has also been transparent about why this work is urgent:
“This project is deeply personal to me. When I first became Special Collections Librarian at Fisk, the sheer volume of requests for the Rosenwald Schools Database was overwhelming—and fascinating. It introduced me to an area of history I had not previously studied, but I quickly understood the urgency of its preservation and access. I knew we had to update the site and expand its offerings so that more people could engage with this story.”
Supported by Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, former dean and librarian emerita, Fisk officials connected with the Mellon Foundation. Entrusted with leading the project, Harris’s vision from the beginning has been clear: “This history belongs to everyone. It is a story about building education for all, and it deserves to be seen, studied, and celebrated.”
Alongside Harris’s leadership—and together with librarians, technologists, student interns, and a national advisory board—all involved have ensured the portal is as welcoming as it is rigorous, meeting today’s archival and digital standards while modeling what’s possible when HBCUs own the means of knowledge production.
Because this is a living project, the public is invited to learn, contribute, and celebrate at each milestone:
- Sept. 19, 2025: School Fund portal went live — rosenwald.fisk.edu
- Sept. 24, 2025: Virtual celebration with a guided tour, educator and alumni reflections, and remarks from Fisk leadership
- June 2026: In-person celebration and Phase I wrap-up
Some will ask what a digital archive can do against the scale of today’s challenges. My answer is simple: it empowers—a professor to teach collaboration from the record, a town to save a building, a policymaker to see that investment in education pays dividends when communities lead, and a young scholar to carry the work forward with code, care, and conviction.
HBCUs have long been wells of Black intellectual life. With the Rosenwald portal, Fisk also models how institutions can preserve the past while building the infrastructure of access for the future. The lesson the records teach is the lesson the project embodies: transformation takes partnership. A century ago, it looked like nickels and nails. Today, it looks like grants, servers, and a campus full of people who believe access is a public good.
As the portal opens, I hope higher education does more than applaud. When you access it at rosenwald.fisk.edu, use it. Faculty, build courses and assignments from it. Alumni and descendants, contribute your photographs and stories. Preservationists anchor campaigns to their evidence. Students, let it show you the power of disciplined imagination. If Beth Howse taught us anything—which she has—the door to history opens wider when we meet it with reverence—and then share it with the world.
Dr. Crystal A. deGregory is a Fisk University alumna, historian, and advisory board member for the Rosenwald Archive project. She also serves as director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University. She is the author of “The Greatest Good: Nashville’s Black Colleges, Their Students, and the Fight for Freedom, Justice, and Equality” (Vanderbilt University Press). She founded HBCUstory and can be found on social media at @HBCUstorian.
