#BlackLivesMatter was coined in the era of hashtag activism. But more than a century ago, the belief that Black lives matter is exactly what drove the flagship program of the NAACP, a campaign to stop lynchings, mob violence, and the state-sanctioned deaths of Black people. The 111-year-old organization “believed protection from violence was the first civil right,” says Megan Ming Francis, a political scientist and historian of philanthropy.
Enter the Garland Fund, which wanted the civil-rights organization to focus on school desegregation. Garland’s money put leaders of the cash-strapped NAACP “in a difficult bind between the desires of white liberals, a foundation with valuable resources, and the urgent needs of their own racial group,” Francis writes in “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture,” a 2019 article in the Law and Society Review.
Garland’s money gradually brought about “a startling shift in the NAACP’s issue agenda from racial violence to education,” says Francis. “The NAACP could not escape the allure of the Garland Fund’s grant.”
This story is a cautionary tale about the vital, yet uneasy relationship of philanthropy and social movements, especially new movements operating at the fringes of society and advocating ideas like “defund the police.” It’s relevant today as billions of dollars of new money has begun to flow to organizations pushing for racial equity.
Social movements need resources, to be sure. But relying on well-to-do donors who may be uncomfortable with radical change leaves them open to influence.
Philanthropists and protest movements are, after all, rarely perfectly aligned. Even Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation president who has cultivated a reputation as a social-justice advocate, ran afoul of prison abolitionists last year because he supported a plan to build a series of small jails that, he argued, would enable the notorious Riker’s Island jail to be closed. “We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of progress,” Walker explained.
Despite such tensions, philanthropists committed to social justice say that protest movements deserve support because they are effective.
“If you look at the history of social change in this country, it almost always occurs from the bottom up, not from the top down,” says Stephen Heinz, the president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which has supported Black Lives Matter.
Social movements brought about the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the minimum wage, the end of Jim Crow, and the U.S.’s first U.S. laws to curb pollution.
More recently, foundations and individual donors underwrote successful grass-roots organizing campaigns for gay marriage, tobacco control, and charter schools.
Leslie Crutchfield, author of How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t, says: “Seeding and growing vast networks of millions of passionate individuals organized around a common cause is infinitely more powerful than any single organization or association, no matter how well-resourced or branded.”
This can be a stretch for some grant makers, she says: “The tendency for foundations and people with power is to go directly to the top. If you want to change the system, it has to be democratic and bottom-up.”
Philanthropy’s Influence
Not only do foundations like to work from the top, but Megan Ming Francis and other scholars worry that once organizers start seeking philanthropic money, they will move away from radical stances. “Movement capture,” she says, can happen when the overt or covert influence of foundation money takes hold. Karen Ferguson, an historian and the author of a book about the Ford Foundation and the Black Power movement in the 1960s, warns activists about “the warping effects of liberal philanthropy’s soft power.”
Foundation leaders and trustees have often benefited from the current power structure, so they want “to create change, but maybe not disturb things so much,” says Maribel Morey, an historian of philanthropy who is writing a book about the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
She cites, as an example, the much-admired philanthropy of Julius Rosenwald, a co-founder of Sears, Roebuck, who from 1912 to 1932 funded the construction of about 5,000 schools in the segregated South. Ford’s Walker called Rosenwald one of his “personal heroes.”
But Morey, writing on the blog HistPhil, points out that Rosenwald built schools for Blacks that failed to challenge white supremacy and Black subordination. He was “a strategic and effective philanthropist, but absolutely not a heroic one,” she says.
Cesar Chavez and Farmworkers
Still another example of philanthropy holding back system change comes from historian Erica Kohl-Arenas in her book The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty. Examining the effect of donors on Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement in California’s Central Valley, Kohl-Arenas argues that Chavez set out to seek power and ownership of the fields for the workers but gradually embraced the idea that the farm workers need to help themselves by building homes, schools, and civic organizations.
Chavez’s philanthropic backers “would not support strikes, boycotts, picket lines, unionization, or anything that had to do with confronting the economic structures of agriculture,” Kohl-Arenas has said. In her book, she quotes from the Rosenberg Foundation’s annual report, which funded the farm workers: “Almost everybody approves if farm workers decide to build houses for themselves; not everybody approves if they decide to go on strike.”
She notes, too, that seeking grant money can distract movement leaders from their core work of organizing: “Inundated with program management, paperwork, and meetings to maintain philanthropic relationships, leaders and organizers become institutional professions accountable to foundations and not to the people they claim to represent or serve.”
Shared Power
That said, in Leslie Crutchfield’s telling, the most successful social movements of the past half-century have been funded by donors who were willing to share power with loose networks working at the state and local levels. This is crucial in the United States, where so much governing power is delegated to states and cities.of grass-roots groups.
For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which from 1991 to 2009 spent nearly $700 million on efforts to prevent tobacco uptake, especially by children, distributed the money to coalitions in 40 states, as well as to local health organizations and even businesses willing to advocate for higher tobacco taxes or smoke-free zones.
Similarly, while software entrepreneur Tim Gill spent more than $400 million of his fortune to support gay rights and then gay marriage, much of that money was spent at the state level, according to Crutchfield. States and localities embraced gay rights at their own pace, so leaving control in the hands of local groups was key.
The charter-school movement is yet another example of bottom-up organizing, paid for by philanthropy. National donors, including the Gates and Walton Foundations, worked with local donors like the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, and the Joyce Foundation in Chicago to fund think tanks and advocacy as well as community organizations and individual schools.
“Milwaukee’s Black community was upset with the performance of the public-school system,” recalled Michael Hartmann, former director of research at Bradley. “There were protests and marches.” Today, there are about 7,500 charter schools in 43 states.
Foundations concerned about climate change, by contrast, for years invested very little in movement-building. As a result, they failed to build a strong and broad-based political movement for climate action. Progress towards curbing climate change has been scant.
More recently, though, dozens of local and national activists, many of them funded by foundations, helped stop two major fossil-fuel projects, the Atlantic Coast natural-gas pipeline and the Keystone XL Ppipeline. They had organized protests, risked arrest, and filed lawsuits to stop the pipelines.
Bill McKibben, the author and activist, wrote: “The victory here is measured not just in pipelines defeated but in pipelines and other projects that will never even be proposed, simply because it has been demonstrated that opponents have the resources — in bodies, in determination, in legal talent, and in moral standing — to slow them down to the point where profitability becomes impossible.” Put simply, movements work.
