Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. McGeorge Bundy, Action for Equal Opportunity (New York: Ford Foundation, 1966). 2. National Affairs, “Proposed Budget: Fiscal Year 1970,” June 1968, Budget Papers, Box 8, Ford Foundation Archives (FF), Rockefeller Archive Center; Ford Foundation, Management and Program Trends in the Fifties and Sixties (New York: Ford Foundation, 1971), 47–48. 3. The extensive literature covering the Foundation’s role in founding black studies programs indicates Ford’s essential role in institutionalizing black power. I examine the other initiatives listed in the chapters to follow. See Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Noliwe Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States (New York: Ford Foundation, 2007). 4. See, in particular, Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Robert L. Allen , Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Doubleday, 1969); Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Rooks. 5. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1986); Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). For a New York–specific example of this argument, see Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Devin Fergus’s provocative book on liberalism and black power differs from these works in its more sympathetic treatment of liberals, whom he portrays as martyring their cause in order to save the nation in the face of the separatist threat of black nationalism. For other examples of prominent recent scholarship that internalize the trope of black power’s prominent role in the death of postwar racial liberalism, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: 272 Notes to Pages 3–6 Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Peter Schuck, Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2003). 6. While some recent works have focused on the elite origins of today’s post–civil rights racial liberalism, they focus almost exclusively on diversity in higher education and lack in-depth historical analysis. For two examples from very different perspectives , see Noliwe Rooks and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). 7. Bundy. 8. There is a rich recent scholarship on black power that examines these processes. See Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country : Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940‒1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 9. Singh, 214. See also Nelson Lichtenstein, “Social Theory and Capitalist Reality in the American Century,” in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 13. 10. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233‒1263. 11. Martin Mayer, “Washington’s Grant to the Ford Foundation,” New York Times Magazine, 13 November 1966, 150. 12. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 200. 13. Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 21, 40, 53‒54; Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge...