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Epilogue: The Diminishing Expectations of Racial Liberalism The diminution of the purview and program of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC) matched the Foundation’s shrinking expectations for its community-development work overall. In the end, institution building and leadership development were the only concrete and lasting accomplishments of the Foundation’s efforts to build and sustain communitydevelopment corporations (CDCs), which it nevertheless celebrated as the successful culmination of its work in social development. Ford readily conceded these shortcomings in assessments of its achievements on this front, both frankly admitting the impossibility of its earlier, lofty goals in solving the urban crisis and setting more modest and cautious goals for itself in achieving social change. A 1975 assessment of the model’s limitations was typical, in that it concluded that while CDCs were “attempting to help overcome the severe adverse effects on the local community of the broader social, economic, and political forces at work,” an individual corporation “should not be held responsible for adverse changes in such community-wide measures ” nor “should it claim that its acts are solely responsible for any observed positive changes.”1 The Foundation’s recognition of and helplessness in the face of what it now acknowledged to be intractable structural issues represented a striking shift from the optimism of McGeorge Bundy’s first years at the Foundation. Operational changes bore a major responsibility for this turn; after losing $1 billion of its $3 billion dollar endowment in the stock market downturn of 1974, Ford announced in December of that year that it intended to cut its annual grant giving by half, to around $100 million annually. This decline represented market realities as well as a new fiscal conservatism for Ford; despite scaling back giving at the beginning of his presidency, Bundy and the trustees had nevertheless persisted with the earlier practice of disbursing more than the Foundation earned, digging into its capital in the interests of 256 Epilogue aggressively pursuing program objectives during the affluence of the 1960s. Now, chastened by the market downturn, they would have to live within the Foundation’s means. These cuts came at a time when conditions were worsening for urban black America. Stagflation’s pernicious mix of recession and inflation hastened American cities’ postindustrial decline, leaving the working poor only with minimum-wage service jobs. Black unemployment rates skyrocketed in places like Bedford-Stuyvesant, once magnets for black migrants and immigrants who had found work in Brooklyn’s robust postwar industrial economy. Meanwhile, cuts to social welfare programs, begun by Nixon in the late 1960s and marking the right’s ideological rise, took on a new fiscal urgency in the 1970s. Furthermore, with the white workforce also reeling from the economic downturn, little political appetite remained among the racial majority and their political representatives for what they now largely perceived as costly 1960s-style social engineering and special pleading on behalf of the nation’s nonwhite poor. In no time, the politically and economically expedient call for welfare reform would roll back the expansive idealism of the War on Poverty.2 Internally, Ford’s leaders understood and acknowledged that the Foundation ’s cutbacks came at the worst possible time for the black poor in the context of these national realities.3 Nevertheless, given its straitened circumstances , Foundation executives felt that they had no choice but to cut back on giving. Downsizing had a number of repercussions for the Foundation and its grantees. First and foremost, Ford no longer had the same capacity or will to intervene independently in social policy, as it had with Gray Areas or the community-control demonstrations, when it funded programs that deliberately sought to destabilize entrenched bureaucracies and government programs in order to spark change. Instead, the Foundation, which was also fearful of ongoing political attacks against its liberal activism, submitted and conformed to the discipline imposed by the conservative ascendancy. So, for example, it focused in this era on establishing technical support institutions, like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which served the downloading of social-service provision to the nonprofit sector by helping local organizations compete in the new market for government grants. It also set up think tanks like the Urban Institute, which acted as a contractor to fulfill government’s social research priorities rather than spearheading its own. Finally, it continued its commitment to supporting the CDC program and to beginning new ones, like the Manpower Demonstration Research Corpora- [3.22.51.241] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 03...

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