‘While I Breathe, I Hope': A Black Nonprofit Leader and Daughter of the South Returns Home

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I recently started a new job, my first as a nonprofit CEO after more than 20 grueling but glorious years as a fundraiser. The position takes me to South Carolina, where many in my family live, and away from Washington, D.C., where I’ve worked most of my career.

Friends and colleagues congratulate me for leaving what they see as the city’s ugly and divisive partisan culture. But no one in America is free and clear of today’s toxic terrifying threats. Americans everywhere thirst for a more just, free, and equitable country.

My family knows firsthand how South Carolina has failed to live up to our country’s ideals. My ancestors were enslaved there; some were owned by a lieutenant governor, William Bull, who helped put down a slave revolt in the 1740s. In 1965, my mother was the oldest of seven Black students to desegregate the Elloree Public School System. Three of my father’s college classmates were murdered on February 8, 1968, in the little-known Orangeburg Massacre by state troopers who had pledged to use their authority to provide just service and equitable protection.

Tyrone Williams/Courtesy of Tycely Williams

More recently, on June 17, 2015, we wept upon learning that a white supremacist had gunned down nine people attending Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a church once under the spiritual leadership of my great grandfather, the Rev. Dr. B.H. Gray, presiding elder for the Seventh Episcopal District.

In college, at Wake Forest University, I studied under the late Maya Angelou, the legendary poet and inspiring civil-rights activist. “Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space,” she often asserted. “Invite one to stay.”

Generations of my family bravely invited hope to stay. So, too, do the philanthropists that we honor in Black Philanthropy Month. And as I return to South Carolina, I embrace the hope that with adequate human and financial resources, every corner of America can actualize freedom, liberty, and justice for all.

That hope is what makes us American, and it must dwell among us to bind and mend the differences that seek to divide and devastate.

A Daughter of Alabama

I was born in 1975 in Birmingham, Ala., a dozen years after members of the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church. This horrific blast killed Denise McNair, who was 11; Addie Mae Collins, 14; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley, 14. People in Birmingham rarely refer to them as “four little girls” — we call them by name, a reflex shared by today’s #SayHerName Campaign.

I entered the world almost a decade after the end of the legal apartheid created by Jim Crow laws. As a young child, I pondered meaningful questions, “Would my life and opportunities be shadowed by systemic racism even though many acts were not lawful?”

Courtesy of Tycely Williams

Along with my friends, I hopscotched between racial norms, social standards, and fixed mindsets. My parents didn’t need to explicitly teach me how to “code switch”; I learned early on that Black people talked about certain things in certain ways only with other Black people.

I didn’t like it. It seemed disingenuous and counter to my family’s principles. When I confronted my mother, she responded, “You’re too young to understand.” It was, she explained, a matter of safety. That was obvious and sensible for Black Americans who knew of friends or family members hung from trees or beaten to death by police batons. But I didn’t understand.

Through my adolescence, I sought to increase my knowledge and expand my emotional intelligence. I often participated in oratory contests and remembrances where we recited the speeches and writings of civil rights leaders. I drew inspiration from the letter that Dr. Martin Luther King wrote from his jail cell in Birmingham following a 1963 march, particularly this passage:

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure.

This letter helped me to better understand. Although my hometown’s white community failed Dr. King, his words pushed and persuaded me as a daughter of Birmingham to live a life rooted in the hope that Dr. King sought in my hometown.

Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.

By the end of high school, I developed a clear sense of what it meant to find common ground in common values. Tanner Colby, a high school friend, captured my evolution in Some of My Best Friends Are Black, a book he later wrote about schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches in the years after the civil rights movement. I spoke with him for the book and told him that on the first day of school:

I promised myself that I would be nice to everyone, because there was a fear that people would not be nice to me because of my race. But all my experiences proved otherwise. I never had to be anything other than who I was. I think I was able to make as many friends as I did because I had a high level of sensitivity that most teenagers don’t have, and I had that because I was Black. There were skaters and jocks, and this group wouldn’t talk to that group — I never fell victim to those classifications.

‘While I Breathe, I Hope’

Moving through the overwhelmingly white world of philanthropy as a Black woman, I have been driven by the idea that individual Americans, whatever their differences, share the vision of a more perfect union and the values of freedom, justice, and equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

Returning to South Carolina, I am working more proximate to solutions to today’s increased political division, religious conflict, and unprecedented sociocultural disruptions. I have joined Liberty Fellowship, where we are building a cadre of leaders in the state dedicated to bringing together diverse sets of people from all walks of life. With our training and support, these leaders help everyday South Carolinians work across differences to solve problems in their communities.

Courtesy of Tycely Williams

I “hope” our work will help heal racial divides, increase accountability for wrongs and harms of the past, and introduce a better way for people to think, live, and thrive. I’m comforted that my spirit of hopefulness aligns with the spirit of many South Carolinans. Our state motto, after all, is: “While I breathe, I hope.”

The work of Liberty Fellowship is a reminder that philanthropy is a uniquely American institution. The colonists came to this country with a European view of charity as an exercise of patronage practiced by churches and governments, not everyday people. Americans, however, organized giving with a democratic mindset, in which people pooled their resources and banded together to help one another.

Ben Franklin, often considered the father of modern philanthropy, helped bring together residents of his hometown of Philadelphia to create a library, a volunteer firehouse, and a hospital. This American tradition continued into the early 20th century and was sustained by diverse philanthropists. Julius Rosenwald, a Jewish-American clothier who became part-owner and president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co., partnered with Booker T. Washington, the African American educator, to build more than 5,000 schools, shops, and homes for teachers.

Most stories about American philanthropy celebrate the contributions of people like Ben Franklin, Julius Rosenwald, and Melinda French Gates. The role of Black Americans in building a more just, free, and equitable country is often a footnote at best, and more often routinely ignored.

In 2011, Jackie Bouvier Copeland, founder and chief architect of Black Philanthropy Month, chose August to help America and the world honor the philanthropic contributions of Black Americans. Annually, I join in to highlight well-known philanthropists such as Madam C.J. Walker, who rose from the cotton fields in Louisiana to become America’s first self-made female millionaire. As her wealth increased, she generously invested in many social impact causes and organizations — including YWCAs, where I once led national fundraising efforts.

I take equal excitement in promoting Black philanthropists who give of themselves more than their money. Patrice Sulton, founder and executive director of D.C. Justice Lab, works in our nation’s capital to advance smarter, more just safety solutions. Like me, Patrice draws her inspiration from her family, which has deep roots in Orangeburg, S.C.

Cecil Williams

In the 1990s, James “Jim” E. Sulton, Sr., her grandfather, served as the co-leader of Project Hope sponsored by the Palmetto Project “to get blacks and whites to gather in frank conversation and friendship.”

Answer the Call

Throughout August, I wish everyone I encounter a Happy Black Philanthropy Month. My white friends and colleagues sometimes question if it is appropriate for them to engage in the celebration. Others worry that the emphasis on racial identity contributes to the country’s divisions.

Here’s what everyone should understand: My story and the stories that we celebrate this month bring to light what is invisible to many — that Black Americans have throughout the country’s history invested in philanthropy as an integral part of the country’s identity and collective pride.

These stories can inspire everyone — not just Black Americans — to step up. My ancestors and many of those Black philanthropists we celebrate this month answered the call to care for one another, community, and the country even when they had a rightful reason to turn away. They acted to realize the same principles and ideals as those cherished by Americans who have always enjoyed freedom.

Courtesy of Tycely Williams

Dr. Angelou was right — and remains right. Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. America must invite one to stay. Fear will erase the philanthropic contributions of Black America. Hope will leverage this observance and the underrepresented, unknown Black protagonists to inspire all Americans and others around the globe.

How will you respond? My hope is that all Americans, and those who aspire to one day become American, forever uphold the moral responsibilities intertwined with our inalienable rights. May the pursuit of common ground help to rehabilitate past transgressions, strengthen present-day plans, and better equip us to form a more perfect union that is free, just, and equitable for all.

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