GALLION, Ala. -- Almost eight decades have passed since Charles S. Foreman Sr. entered the first grade in the farm community of Gallion.

At first, he went to school in a church -- Oak Grove Baptist. As was often the case in the South, rural blacks went to school where they could -- churches, shacks, barns, tumble-down schoolhouses -- learning their ABC's in the months between planting and picking. Young Foreman, the son of tenant farmers, was no exception.

As Booker T. Washington had lamented in 1914 in Outlook magazine, "More money is paid for Negro convicts than for Negro teachers in Alabama." He offered up Wilcox County, Ala., as an example, saying that "per capita expenditure for education in 1912 was $17 for whites as against 37 cents for Negroes." In the state of Mississippi in 1912, Washington wrote, 64 percent of the black children in the state had attended no public school whatsoever.

By 1925, though, when Foreman was 8, he looked across a field next to Oak Grove Baptist and saw an edifice being erected with tall, whitewashed walls, high windows to gather the sun, and a shiny tin roof.

It was a Rosenwald School.

"It was nice," Foreman, now 85, recalls with a smile.

Oak Grove would become one of more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools throughout the South and Southwest. Built along strict specifications and varying by size, the grammar schools took their name from Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck & Co.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, headquartered in Washington, recently named the Rosenwald Schools, as a group, one of the 11 endangered historic sites in the United States for 2002-03. [...]