Julius Rosenwald, of Sears, Roebuck and Co. notoriety, along with Booker T. Washington established the Rosenwald Fund, a philanthropic program established to combat racial inequality by providing educational opportunities to African American children and supporting academic, intellectual, and creative endeavors of older African Americans. Educational opportunities were provided through the funding of Rosenwald Schools, a program that, using matching funds from the community, built schools for the use of African Americans in the segregated South. From 1912 to 1932, over 5,000 schools were built. Support for older African Americans came 17 years after this in the form of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, a grants program used to support African American artistic and intellectual pursuits. Over 500 recipients were awarded financial assistance.
Celebrating & Connecting: A Convening of North Carolina Rosenwald Schools was a two-day event hosted by the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission (AAHC), in partnership with the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR), and the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office (NCHPO). In preparation for this event, I was tasked with creating a logo, selecting type and color choices used for branding the event, as well as designing panels for an exhibit highlighting notable Rosenwald Fellows.
For the design of the logo, project leaders from the AAHC expressed a desire to use a revamped illustrative interpretation of previous Rosenwald Convening logos. These previous designs used simplistic, iconic depictions of a typical Rosenwald school. Members also used the keywords 'inviting, connection, and celebration' as descriptors of tone and point of view they wish to achieve with the design and branding of the event. With this information in mind, my research ultimately led me to choose an HBCU preppy aesthetic as a guide. To me, this meant rich earth tones combined with serif fonts and an illustration styled after those appearing in primary documents from the time. A deep brick red was chosen for the primary color as a symbol of the brick foundations typically found on the schools, as well as the red clay that is found in the soil of North Carolina.
The exhibit, entitled "Stewards of Change," gives a brief overview of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program before highlighting the contributions of 6 notable members. The design of these panels features images sourced from the North Carolina State Archives, stylized in halftone. I selected images of people interacting with the school, rather than solely the buildings, to demonstrate how integral these schools were to their communities. The halftone was chosen as a way to simplify distinguishing features of the people in an attempt to treat them as a proxy, allowing viewers of this exhibit to place themselves in the not-too-distant past.
Swag and giveaways were created for the event using this logo and branding information. I was not involved in the layout design or production of these items.
