This exhibit is sponsored by
Stock Yards Bank & Trust and Skipper and Hana Martin.
Join the Filson Historical Society
for the opening of the traveling exhibit, A Better Life for Their Children:
Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed
America – Photographs, storytelling, and original curation by Andrew Feiler.
Participants will have the opportunity to meet the curator in the gallery to
engage in conversation and answer questions. At 5:15 pm, the curator, staff,
and sponsors will share short remarks. This exhibit opening is free and open to
the public, but registration is encouraged.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, a
visionary partnership between a Black educator and white Jewish business leader
launched transformational change across the segregated South. A Better Life
for their Children is a traveling photography exhibition about the
Rosenwald Schools that Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald partnered in
creating between 1912 and 1937 to serve black students in rural communities.
The program built 4,978 schools across fifteen southern and border states
including 155 in Kentucky. Rosenwald schools created educational access for
African Americans in places where it had been severely restricted. Of the
original schools, only about 500 survive, 3 of which are in Jefferson County.
Atlanta-based photographer Andrew Feiler spent more than three years
documenting the remaining schools and the stories that live on in generations
of graduates. This body of work became a book by the same title,
published by University of Georgia Press in 2021.
Andrew Feiler is a photographer, author, and fifth generation
Georgian. Having grown up Jewish in Savannah, he has been shaped by the
rich complexities of the American South.