Tankersley Rosenwald School was one of fourteen schools constructed in Montgomery County with funding assistance from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Between 1912 and 1932, Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish philanthropist and CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Company, teamed up with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute to provide matching grants for the construction of school buildings for African Americans in mostly rural areas of the South. This collaborative effort produced more than 5,000 of these buildings in fifteen southern states, including 389 in Alabama. The building was placed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 2001. Its first trustees were Frank Supples, Luke Anderson, John Sankey, Edd Dean, Simon Johnson, Arthur Brown, and John Oscar Poole, and its first principal was Jacob W. Williams.