American Foundations: Roles and Contributions

15. Foundations, Social Movements, and the Contradictions of Liberal Philanthropy

328 15 Foundations, Social Movements, and the Contradictions of Liberal Philanthropy alice o’connor Few issues in the history of organized philanthropy have been as fraught with conflict, controversy, and apparent contradiction as the role of foundations in movements for equal rights, social justice, and political democracy in the twentieth-century United States. Foundations, after all, have been subject to frequent criticism as inherently elite and undemocratic institutions, politically unaccountable, and reliant for their very existence on an economic system that produces huge concentrations of individual and corporate wealth. Run by highly educated professionals and governed by well-networked members of what sociologist C. Wright Mills has memorably called the “power elite,” the most prominent hold tremendous, mostly unacknowledged power over the considerably less well heeled constituents of the rights and social justice movements they occasionally subsidize.1 Such disparities only confirm and reinforce the establishment image that major foundations, ironically by supporting social movements , seem so eager to shed. Meantime, the support that foundations provide for social justice movements has drawn considerable criticism from the political right for being subversive of so-called traditional values or for overstepping the boundaries of a more properly charitable purpose. Foundation support for social movements also points up uncomfortable contradictions from the philanthropic past. Early philanthropic programs aimed at 1. For analyses that put foundations squarely within the networks of the power elite, see Mills (1956) and Domhoff (2006). the contradictions of liberal philanthropy 329 “Negro” education and “uplift,” for example, were undertaken in the name of “advancing the race.” Nevertheless, they upheld and helped to institutionalize the principles of Jim Crow and inferior “industrial” education throughout the South, leaving critics to wonder whether the objective was indeed to make sure the “uplift” only went so far.2 Northern white philanthropic support for scholarship and higher education similarly, if more subtly, upheld prevailing racial hierarchies and relegated black scholars and institutions to the second tier—much to the frustration of the intended beneficiaries.3 Early feminist philanthropy was also deeply segregated by race and divided by class, operating less often to empower working-class women than to underscore their dependence on upperclass donors whose interests and ideology differed from their own.4 A review of organized philanthropy’s role in social movements must also reckon with the fact that in the historic twentieth-century struggles for minority and women’s rights, foundations were notoriously behind the curve. With a few notable exceptions, the major campaigns of the interwar and post–World War II black freedom struggle—for equal access to jobs and wages, integrated housing and schools, and elimination of racially motivated restrictions in Social Security, fair labor standards, collective bargaining, and other pillars of the New Deal welfare state—were initiated and orchestrated without substantial funding from the organized, white, and at that point overwhelmingly male-dominated philanthropic sector.5 Far more significant than even the crucial support from progressive white philanthropies such as the Garland Fund (to establish the NAACP’s first legal defense fund in the 1920s) were the thousands of small donations raised on the local “chicken and greens circuit” and through black churches and targeted publicity campaigns.6 The larger and most prominent foundations—even, indeed especially, those that presented themselves as being in the vanguard of social reform—were exceedingly cautious when it came to challenging the racial status quo until well into the 1960s. Here, as in the struggle for women’s rights, foundations came in with major and explicit support only after these movements had gained a degree of public acceptance and political legitimacy, and, crucially, had built up the activist networks and coalitions to translate years of organizing 2. Gaines (1996); Kluger (1976, p. 392); Woodson (1931). 3. See, for example, comments by W. E. B. DuBois quoted in Jackson (1990, p. 25) and by E. Franklin Frazier (1957, pp. 96–97). 4. Gordon (1991); Kirkby (1992). 5. Among the major works on the black freedom struggle that emphasize the centrality of economic as well as social and political rights are Hamilton and Hamilton (1997); MacLean (2006); Jackson (2007); Goluboff (2007). On foundation reluctance to join the struggle to make racial inequity a major issue in social welfare reform, see Mittelstadt (2005, pp. 69–106). 6. Boyle (2004, pp. 203–06); Kluger (1976, pp. 221–26). 330 alice o’connor and advocacy into concrete legislative gains.7 When...