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The Rosenwald rural school building program represented a major effort to improve the quality of public education for African Americans in the early twentieth-century South. In 1912, Julius Rosenwald, a Russian immigrant and high-school dropout who was then President of Sears, gave Booker T. Washington permission to use some of the money he had donated to Tuskegee Institute for the construction of six small schools in rural Alabama, which were constructed and opened in 1913 and 1914. Pleased with the results, Rosenwald then agreed to fund a larger program for schoolhouse construction based at Tuskegee. In 1917 he set up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago-based philanthropic foundation, and in 1920 the Rosenwald Fund established an independent office for the school building program in Nashville, Tennessee. By 1928, one in every five rural schools for black students in the South was a Rosenwald school, and these schools housed one third of the region's rural black schoolchildren and teachers. At the program's conclusion in 1932, it had produced 4,977 new schools, 217 teachers' homes, and 163 shop buildings, constructed at a total cost of $28,408,520 to serve 663,615 students in 883 counties of 15 states.

In 2003, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools as among the "11 Most Endangered Places" in the country. Since then efforts to preserve the remaining Rosenwald Schools, of which Scrabble School is an excellent example, have gathered momentum. For more information on the history and national preservation efforts, please visit the National Trust's Rosenwald Initiative site.