(By our Washington correspondent)
Yesterday, the sixty-sixth birthday of Julius Rosenwald, marked the passage of an eventful year in Mr. Rosenwald’s benevolent activities, Edwin R. Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, stated here.
This year was made significant,” said Mr. Embree, “by reorganization of the fund with an enlarged board of trustees; by an increase in the fund through Mr. Rosenwald’s gift of $2,000,000, all of it to be spent within twenty-five years of his death, and by the largest single gift he has ever made, that of $5,000,000 toward the colonization of Jews from cities on farms in Russia. This year also Mr. Rosenwald was awarded the Harmon medal for his inter-racial work.
“More recently Mr. Rosenwald has underwritten a block between Michigan and Wabash avenues and 46th and 47th streets for model apartments within the reach of negroes of limited earnings.”
The Harmon medal to which Mr. Embree referred is awarded by the Harmon Foundation of New York for the most important contributions toward improving relations between the white and negro races. This year the recipients were James Hardy Dillard of Charlottesville, Va., and Mr. Rosenwald. The awards were announced in January and presented February 22. The Harmon awards were organized in 1926 and are administered by the commission on the church and race relations of the Federal Council of Churches.
The Julius Rosenwald Fund has as its general aim human welfare, and, as one way to attain it, emphasizes the improvement of conditions among Negroes. For instance, with the cooperation of both white and Negro people and of public officials upward of 4,200 Julius Rosenwald Negro rural schools have been built in fourteen southern states at a cost approaching $19,400,000. These institutions have an enrollment of one-third of all the Negro children in rural schools.
Mr. Rosenwald was styled “one of the great men of Chicago” and “a real Christian” by the Rev. Dr. Jason Noble Pierce, pastor of the Washington church to which President Coolidge belongs. “Julius Rosenwald exemplifies this. He is a gift of God to this generation,” Dr. Pierce declared.
Hundreds of congratulatory messages were received by Mr. Rosenwald at his summer home in Ravinia, a north shore suburb of Chicago.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
