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

Introduction

Introduction On August 2, 1966, McGeorge Bundy made his first major policy statement as Ford Foundation president in a speech to the National Urban League in Philadelphia. Entitled “Action for Equal Opportunity,” Bundy’s address was a clarion call for a new era at the Ford Foundation, by far the largest and most influential philanthropy in the world. Bundy declared that the Foundation’s most prestigious and costly programs would experiment boldly by dealing with the ongoing black freedom struggle, especially black power’s challenge to the nation. Pegged for Foundation president in 1965, the year of both the Voting Rights Act and the Watts riot, Bundy, along with his program officers and the Foundation’s trustees, was keenly aware that the legislative victories of the civil rights movement had not solved what he still called the “Negro problem” of black assimilation into American society. In fact, as the struggle for equal opportunity had turned from “rights to reality,” Bundy saw that “the agenda for the immediate future [was] as full and pressing as it [had] been at any time in the past.”1 Over the next ten years, the Foundation would ramp up its spending on “rights for minorities,” granting more than $100 million in this area from 1965 to 1969 alone, in amounts reaching 40 percent of the entire budget for domestic programs by 1970.2 Making a speech about equal opportunity to the National Urban League, a venerable and unimpeachably mainstream and moderate black organization , was hardly controversial; however, what Bundy did next was. In a deeply counterintuitive move he sought to relegitimize racial liberalism’s promise of color-blind opportunity and inclusion, not by attacking black power’s repudiation of this American creed but by directly engaging black activists and their call for separatism and self-determination. As a result of Bundy’s contrariness , the Ford Foundation played a pivotal role in establishing many of the hallmark legacies of the black power era, such as ghetto-based economic development initiatives, university black studies programs, multicultural and “affective” school curricula, and race-specific arts and cultural organizations.3 2 Introduction In fact, Ford played an instrumental part not simply in bankrolling such initiatives but in originating many of these projects itself, all of which served its interests in finding a way to deal with the challenge that the black freedom struggle presented to the nation’s dominant ideas, practices, and institutions. In doing so, Bundy and his officers played a vanguard role in a nationwide effort by the so-called liberal establishment to engage black power. The perplexing story of how elite, liberal whites, those from the Ford Foundation prominent among them, worked to institutionalize elements of a black power project seemingly antithetical to their worldview has fascinated a wide range of commentators over the last decades. This confounding relationship has held particular interest because it arose at a critical juncture for both white liberalism and the black freedom struggle that would ultimately see the decline of both. Scholars of black power most often blame, but sometimes credit, expedient white liberals and their institutions for neutralizing the threat of the movement’s liberationist potential—essentially helping to kill it through soft power while law-and-order hard power attacked it from the right.4 In return, many students of American politics and intellectual life have held black power, along with the Vietnam War, responsible for pushing liberalism beyond the brink, thereby resulting in the “unraveling” of the consensus that had unified the nation in the postwar period. As the story goes, liberals’ variously motivated accommodation of bottom-up African American insurgency brought about the death of the postwar and civil rights period’s incipient integrationism, equal opportunity, and color-blindness and ushered in the birth of multiculturalism, welfare entitlement, affirmative action , and identity politics—developments that in turn sparked a white backlash that helped propel the conservative turn in American politics.5 Even though these arguments are mutually opposed, they both have validity . However, as their contradiction suggests, they each miss the full story of liberalism’s engagement with black power. In this book I seek to capture the complexity of this episode by widening the historical lens on the relationship between elite liberals and the actors and ideas that animated black power. This perspective has allowed me to uncover, among other things, strong and surprising affinities between Foundation officers’ postwar formulation of racial liberalism and the racial separatism of Ford’s black grantees , which helps to...