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Chapter 6 The Best and the Brightest In January 1979, the Ford Foundation announced that Franklin Thomas would replace the retiring McGeorge Bundy as the president of the Foundation , which was still the nation’s largest and most powerful philanthropy. In making this appointment, the trustees made a monumental gesture that symbolized the culmination of Ford’s long-standing commitment to racial assimilation. Thomas was not only black but also a Foundation protégé, having spent ten years from 1967 to 1977 as the handpicked, founding president of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), a demonstration by Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Ford Foundation to institutionalize establishment liberalism’s attack on the urban crisis through the creation and support of community-development corporations (CDCs). Unlike most of the other African American grantees with whom the Foundation had dealt in the late 1960s, Thomas had not disappointed Ford’s officers and trustees, and the CDC model had cultivated his talents and those of the dozens of black leaders he had helped to develop at BSRC. Thomas’s appointment as the Foundation’s president was tangible proof that social development ’s strategy of black leadership development and individual upward mobility had worked and that Ford’s own scheme for community development had fostered that success. Thomas’s move was also widely interpreted both inside and outside the Foundation as a portent of further racial progress and perhaps even a postracial future. As the New York Times editorialized, “When corporate America can hand such power to a black citizen, there is truly hope that race will one day be irrelevant.”1 The Foundation’s announcement of Thomas’s appointment was a long way off in 1967, when he took the helm at BSRC. It was also after what Paul Ylvisaker called the Foundation’s “beautiful running time” during the first half of the 1960s, when his enormously influential strategy of systems reform and assimilation through community action shaped the cutting edge of the Best and Brightest 211 era’s activist federal social policy. By 1967, Ford’s social-engineering approach to the urban crisis faced intense scrutiny and criticism.2 Black insurgency and rebellion, along with the white backlash against it, suggested that the Foundation’s strategy had done nothing to quell the urban crisis and, as a growing number of critics charged, may have even abetted it. The Ford Foundation found itself at the center of this political maelstrom thanks to actions like its involvement in the schools crisis, which prompted both vocal and nationwide criticism, along with institutional review from within. After the failure of initiatives like the community-control experiment and the punitive federal tax reforms that followed it, the Foundation beat a retreat from the political arena. Nevertheless, Bundy and his officers stuck by their conviction that “the fact that large numbers of . . . minority group citizens live in poverty and isolation in depressed central city . . . areas,” as Vice President of National Affairs Mitchell Sviridoff put it, represented “the nation’s most serious democratic problem.”3 Solving that problem remained the Foundation’s key domestic mission. However, in the wake of the controversy surrounding its own recent community-action activities and the ones they inspired through the War on Poverty, the Foundation altered its strategy for social development in the ghetto to one that followed the national political mood and its own ideological roots by shifting right. It moved toward individual versus group-based initiatives; local rather than national programs; capitalist economic development over social welfare programs; less government and more private-sector involvement in the ghetto; the rejection of grassroots participatory democracy for the top-down leadership of the elite theory of democracy; and the values and practices of corporate America, all the while retaining the assimilationthrough -segregation strategy of developmental separatism. The instrument that the Foundation settled on to achieve this reorientation was the CDC, an institution that it did not originate but that it had been shaping through funding since community development’s first incarnations in the early 1960s. The CDC offered a new place-based, public-private model for the economic and social development of the nonwhite poor, once again putting the Foundation at the forefront of American social policy, this time by anticipating the nationwide trend toward localism and privatization that eschewed the grandiose, statist solutions of the dying New Deal order. Also in keeping with the national mood, the CDC retained the Foundation’s ongoing focus on race- and ghetto-based solutions...

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