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SALISBURY, MD---First, Julius Rosenwald built a retail empire. Then he helped build an education for thousands of African Americans in America’s rural South, including Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

With encouragement from author and educator Booker T. Washington, the president and co-owner of Sears, Roebuck & Co. financed over 5,000 schools, shops and teachers’ homes for African Americans.

His philanthropy is chronicled in the documentary Rosenwald: The Remarkable Story of a Jewish Partnership with African American Communities by filmmaker Aviva Kempner. A screening is 7 p.m. Thursday, March 9, in Salisbury University’s Patricia R. Guerrieri Academic Commons Assembly Hall.

The movie is shown in connection with the exhibit “When Communities Come Together: African American Education on the Eastern Shore,” on display in the building’s first-floor lobby. Sponsored by SU’s Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture, a reception for the exhibit is 6-7 p.m.

The New York Times said Rosenwald “isn’t just a portrait of a great American or his powerful company, but an excavation of an ugly strain of our own history and a reminder of what one person can do to uproot it.” The Washington Post hailed it as a “stirring documentary [that] evokes a vision of American comity from a past that speaks to the present.”

Admission is free and the public is invited. For more information call 410-543-6312 or visit the ³ÉÈ˶¶Òõwebsite at www.salisbury.edu.