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Robert Woodson, head of the Washington-based Woodson Institute, which works with grassroots community organizations nationwide, has proposed in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, that Rosenwald be remembered in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, at least with an exhibit for the world to see how well groups can work together to solve problems instead of creating them.

"The wonderful thing about Rosenwald," Woodson told me after the previous week's massacres, "instead of insisting that he knew best, was his respect for Washington and total commitment to receiving Washington's counsel as a peer."

Instead of paying the total cost of pre-fabricated homes and school buildings from Sears, as Rosenwald originally wanted, he followed Washington's plan to double and triple production by matching Rosenwald's funding with local contributions from churches, organizations and individuals, including Tuskegee faculty and students in architecture and building trades.

The result was almost 5,000 new Rosenwald schools for children in 15 states in two decades of construction, including, as I discovered while researching Rosenthal, the schools that almost all of my Alabama cousins attended. Thanks, J.R.!

"The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race," Rosenwald once wrote, according to his grandson and biographer Peter Ascoli, "on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer."

Filmmaker Aviva Kempner, writer and producer of the 2015 documentary "Rosenwald: A Remarkable Story of a Jewish Partnership with African American Communities," told me how Rosenwald was inspired by faith in two Jewish ideals: "tzedakah," Hebrew for charity, and "tikkun olam," repairing the world, two principles still worth keeping alive.

Rosenwald did much more, including the building of black YMCAs and YWCAs and extending foundation grants to black artists and writers, including opera singer Marian Anderson, poet Langston Hughes, photographer Gordon Parks and writer James Baldwin.

But Rosenwald's life is also worth remembering and emulating as a model of an enduring American ideal: how people from different races, religions and cultures can work together for the common good, making America's diversity our strength -- whether some people refuse to recognize that or not.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.