In this fascinating book Stephanie Deutsch recounts the story of the extraordinary friendship and philanthropic partnership between Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, the vocational training school for black teachers that he had established in Alabama in 1881, and Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and one of the preeminent Jewish philanthropists in America.

Booker T. Washington

Rosenwald had been born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, where his parents had settled and opened a clothing store shortly after emigrating from Germany. In 1895, after having worked in the family’s wholesale clothing business for more than a decade, Rosenwald purchased a 25 percent stake in the company of one of his local customers, a small mail-order house by the name of Sears, Roebuck, becoming the president in 1908. Under his direction Sears, Roebuck and Co. became the largest mail-order company in the world, and by 1925, Rosenwald’s personal holdings had risen from $37,500 to a then-prodigious $150 million. While Rosenwald’s accomplishments at Sears showed him to be a pioneer of modern business, he was also a trailblazer in philanthropy, devoting as much energy to giving away his money as he had to acquiring it. Like his contemporary Andrew Carnegie, Rosenwald saw himself as a public servant, the temporary steward of wealth entrusted to him for the purpose of bettering the world. To this end, he gave millions to the University of Chicago and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and to a host of Jewish organizations throughout the country.