The philanthropic world has leapt full speed into the movement for racial justice. The Open Society Foundations, the Mellon Foundation, and the California Endowment, among others, have pledged more than $200 million each to fight systemic racism. Foundations, corporations, and major individual donors have so far this year committed a combined $5.9billion to racial equity — compared with $3.3 billion over the entire previous nine years.
Where will all this money go? According to Candid, the philanthropy research group that compiled these numbers, some two-thirds of the 2020 commitments aim to employ strategies of “policy, advocacy,, and systems reform.”
One can only hope that donors also come up with some more concrete plans.
For guidance, they may want to look to the philanthropic example of Julius Rosenwald, the business executive who built the Sears, Roebuck and Company and who supported the education of African American children in the South through his Rosenwald Fund. The late civil-rights leader and Rep. John Lewis was an alumnus of what came to be called the “Rosenwald schools.” So was the writer Toni Morrison.
A study by two researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve noted that between the two world wars, when the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative built most of it 5,000 schools, the education gap between Southern-born Black and white males narrowed sharply in areas such as school attendance, literacy, and cognitive-test scores. Using census data and World War II records, the researchers found that Rosenwald’s program explained a stunning 40 percent narrowing of the racial education gap.
Nonetheless, not everyone has a glowing view of Rosenwald. Some consider his philanthropy too timid, too willing to acquiesce to the South’s Jim Crow system by supporting separate schools, rather than challenging the legality of the system itself. Maribel Morey, a historian of philanthropy who is co-editor of the HistPhil blog, writes that she “cringed” when some people called Rosenwald a “hero.” While acknowledging that he was “rather unique” in establishing a foundation that spent all its money in a set period of time, she argued that in his advocacy he was “far from unique or, for that matter, a risk-taker who wagered big” when compared with civil-rights activists of the time, such as Ida B. Wells.
More circumspectly, Temple University historian Lila Corwin Berman concluded that Rosenwald’s philanthropy “replicated many of the fundamental injustices of power and resource allocation in the United States.” Then again, she adds, “this may be the central problem with philanthropy itself.”
Closing Economic and Education Gaps
The diverging views of Rosenwald’s legacy echo the divide over how best to support today’s racial-justice movement. Pronouncements from foundation leaders such as Darren Walker, Ford Foundation president, who called on grant makers to pursue justice, not just support worthy projects, suggest that much of the new funding will focus on political, economic, and legal changes meant to improve conditions for people of color. But donors should also think twice before passing up opportunities to contribute directly to promising programs that can close economic and education gaps.
Evidence shows, for example, that well-designed charter schools and scholarship programs that allow more children from low-income families to attend religious schools and private institutions can boost educational achievement. Supporting them may be as sure a way to improve educational opportunities for children of color as the Rosenwald schools were in the segregated South.
Similarly, donors may have opportunities to help remedy the chronic health conditions that have contributed to a disproportionate number of Covid-19 cases and deaths among people of color. Efforts to cure sickle cell anemia, a debilitating disease more common in African Americans than other groups, are already well underway. So are programs such as the well-evaluated Nurse-Family Partnership, which address high rates of maternal and infant illness among Black and brown people.
The relationship between Black people and law enforcement has also figured prominently in this year’s conversation. But as James Forman Jr. revealed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Locking Up Our Own, the issue is complex, not least of all because Black political leaders (and voters) have often supported more vigorous policing and longer prison sentences. Still, as he notes, a variety of promising efforts, including efforts to provide mental health services to offenders could be expanded with more philanthropic support — and without the need to address contentious issues such as police budgets.
Neighborhoods Matter
Income inequality is yet another topic that has received considerable attention in recent months. One of the foremost economists studying it, Harvard’s Raj Chetty, emphasizes the importance of neighborhood conditions to an individual’s economic prospects. He has demonstrated that Black children who grow up in safer, more integrated neighborhoods, with good schools and many two-parent families, tend to do better than Black children who don’t live in such communities. For decades, policy makers have tried, mostly in vain, to create those kinds of neighborhoods through a range of projects. Philanthropists now have an opportunity to fill that gap by identifying, supporting, and promoting programs that show signs of success.
Achieving racial equity will certainly involve some amount of “policy, advocacy, and systems reform.” Improving education for Black people in the South ultimately required ending official school segregation, not just building 5,000 Rosenwald schools. Philanthropists are not misguided in putting part of their money behind public-policy strategies that address systemic racism.
But they also need to devote some of that money to more immediate prospects. The path to policy and systemic change is long, twisting, and subject to many influences, not just the money and ideals of well-intentioned philanthropists. In the meantime, as the lesson of Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald schools show, many useful programs are worth supporting and expanding as we work toward the ultimate goal: equity and justice for all Americans.
Leslie Lenkowsky is an Indiana University expert on philanthropy and public affairs and a regular contributor to these pages. He and Suzanne Garment, a visiting scholar at Indiana University, write frequently on philanthropy and public policy.