The Gift and the Debt

About the book

What is owed, and to whom, when the same gift that lifts a people also measures the distance it cannot close?

In 1912, Julius Rosenwald — the merchant who built Sears, Roebuck into the largest store on earth — began giving his fortune away. Guided by Booker T. Washington, he helped raise more than five thousand schools for Black children across the segregated South. The gift carried a condition: every community he helped had to build alongside him, dollar for dollar, board for board.

For the children who filled those rooms, a Rosenwald school was a door held open in a country practiced at closing them. Generations walked through — and carried what they found into the century that followed. The Gift and the Debt follows that inheritance down the length of a hundred years, tracing the descendants of the schools' first students as their lives converge, states and decades apart, on the question the ledger never settled.