CHARLOTTE -- The great-grandson of educator, Booker T. Washington, spoke Monday about saving a historic black schoolhouse in northeastern Mecklenburg County.

Washington was an educator and dominant leader in the African-American community. He is credited with helping bring the building into existence.

"Booker T. Washington was a redeemer to try to bring us back to where we would have been if we had never been enslaved," Marshall Washington-Cabiness Abuwi, Washington’s great-grandson says.

He says Washington was one of the leaders who helped the community after having been left uneducated for hundreds of years.

Washington did so by working with Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck and Company to form the Rosenwald Fund 100 years ago, helping build black schoolhouses.

It came about as a partnership at a time when black education was gravely underfunded.

A fundraiser was formed to renovate and reclaim this school as a place of learning.

"Create programming that will tell the story of Charlotte’s history, the African-American history," Mary Newsom of the Charlotte Museum of History says.

The partnership between Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington produced more than 5,000 schools across the south, 26 of them in Mecklenburg County alone. It’s the most of any county in the U.S. during the Jim Crow era.

According to historians, the Rosenwald formula described by some as far ahead of its time.

"The Rosenwald plans were state of the art for rural buildings. They were passive solar in many ways. They didn’t generate electricity but they handled light and they handled energy in a very sophisticated way," historian Tom Hanchett says.

Advocates say these schools serve as a reminder of times we must not repeat.

"There were those that wanted to see the African-American people not rise to the level of being on a par with the other ethnic groups," Marshall says.         

The Charlotte Museum of History ultimately wants to turn the one-room schoolhouse into an interactive exhibit that the community can visit.

All ticket proceeds and donations from Monday's event, go toward the renovation project.