The documentary “Rosenwald,” a film about Sears, Roebuck & Company owner Julius Rosenwald’s early 1900s efforts to build schools for African Americans in the South, will be screened at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Mathews High School auditorium.

Guest speakers will be alumni of one of the few such schools remaining, the Antioch Rosenwald School in Susan. The screening is sponsored by the Mathews Film Society and is free and open to the public.

Before the screening, the public is invited to tour the school, which is associated with Antioch Baptist Church and now serves as a museum of local African-American history. Tours will be conducted from 10 a.m. to noon at 110 Antioch Road, Susan.

Antioch Baptist members Virginia Kelley, Mary Mackey, Alice Smith and Winston Thomas recall attending the Antioch Rosenwald School in the late 1930s to the late 1940s, when the school, which was built in 1927, finally closed its doors and the students transferred to Thomas Hunter School in Mathews Court House.

Smith said she remembered having devotions before class and having recess twice a day. There was a big field behind the school where students could play ball, she said, and the large front lawn was ideal for playing games.

Although students carried their own lunches to school for many years, she said, lunch was prepared at the school during its last two years, from 1946 to 1948.

The two-classroom school was heated by a wood stove in each class, with the boys hauling firewood to keep the stoves burning, said Smith. There was no electricity. Instead, the children studied by the light of the sun, which shone through a bank of tall windows installed in each classroom.

Rosenwald schools were always oriented with the entry facing east or west and large windows in classrooms for morning or afternoon light. They also included an industrial room, which had its own bank of tall windows. The larger schools had auditoriums. There were two outhouses at Antioch Rosenwald, said Smith, one for the boys and one for the girls.

The school had two teachers for many years, said Kelley—Thelma Diggs and Clara Brothers. Diggs taught the younger children in one of the classrooms, and Brothers taught the older students. The teachers delineated the grades by rows, with one row of desks for each grade. By the 1940s, said Kelley, fewer children were in attendance, and all the grades were taught by Brothers alone.

Walter Sampson, a newer member of Antioch Baptist, moved to Mathews in 2000 and became interested in local African-American history, particularly the history of the Rosenwald schools. He said that Booker T. Washington, the early-1900s director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was the driving force behind the development of the Rosenwald schools.

African-American education was in a sorry state after 1900, said Sampson, with public schools for blacks receiving less funding than those for whites. Washington approached Rosenwald, who had turned Sears, Roebuck & Company into the world’s largest retailer before becoming a noted philanthropist, and shared his vision of rural schools.

The two men developed a matching grant program that promised to provide around 20 percent of the cost of a school if the local community would come up with 80 percent. By 1932, when the grants ended, over 5,000 new schools had been built in the South, said Sampson. Some of them were one-room schoolhouses, while others were two stories and had classrooms for seven teachers.

Sampson said that, in spite of its clear history as a Rosenwald School, Antioch Rosenwald cannot be entered into the national registry as one because the tall windows that once shed light on the interior are no longer there. When the building ceased being used as a school, he said, it became the parsonage and fellowship hall for Antioch Baptist Church and the windows were all removed.

“The function of the building changed, so the design changed,” he said, adding that efforts are underway to raise funds to restore the school and have it placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Donations will be accepted for that purpose during the film screening, he said.

For more information about the project, call Aretha Thomas at 757-879-5621.