It donated over $70 million to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities, and African American institutions before funds were completely depleted in 1948.
Civil rights leader Julian Bond, whose father received a Rosenwald fellowship, has called the list of grantees a "Who's Who of black America in the 1930s and 1940s.
"[1] Hundreds of grants were disbursed to artists, writers and other cultural figures, many of whom became prominent or already were, including photographers Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Catlett, Marion Palfi,[2] poets Claude McKay, Dr. Charles Drew, Augusta Savage, anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham, singer Marian Anderson, silversmith Winifred Mason,[3] writers Ralph Ellison, W.E.B.
Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, dermatologist Theodore K. Lawless,[4] and poets Langston Hughes and Rita Dove.
The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study began later that year, tracking the progress of untreated disease, and took advantage of poor participants by not informing them fully of its constraints.