Over the next 17 years, Uncle Len ran the program from his office on the Peabody campus, building an additional 5,000 schools. It’s been estimated that during those years, one-third of the South’s rural Black school children and teachers were served by Rosenwald schools.
In the course of his work, Smith became friends with many prominent people. These included Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR, and several times he traveled to the White House to visit them. When Marian Anderson came to Nashville to give a concert, the first thing she did was go to Uncle Len’s house to pay him a visit.
This fascinating bit of history has several family footnotes. My father attended Peabody in the late 1930s, not long after Uncle Len’s retirement. A short time later my parents, Paul Kidd and Ida Sue Smith Kidd, were married at Wightman Chapel, just down the street.
And years after that, our daughter Maggie attended the University School of Nashville, formerly Peabody Demonstration School. I’m sure that, nearly a century before Maggie, Uncle Len walked its halls.
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