sentences:  Washington led the school for decades, building a wide national network of white industrialist donors among some of the major philanthropists of the era, including George Eastman.At the same time, Washington secretly provided funding to the NAACP for its legal defense of some highly visible civil rights cases, including supporting challenges to southern states' discriminatory constitutions and practices that disenfranchised African Americans.Through the 1920s and 1930s, Washington worked with Julius Rosenwald and architects at the college to develop models for rural schools, to be used with Rosenwald's matching funds to gain construction of more rural schools for black children in the South.