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Chapter 2 The Social Development Solution In 1962, the Ford Foundation’s trustees released Directives and Terms of Reference for the 1960s, an implicit call to action against Henry Heald, the Foundation ’s president. Heald’s conservatism and top-down management style had been very attractive to the board just a few years before in the wake of the 1950s Red Scare, but now he seemed stodgy and ill suited for stewardship of Ford’s almost limitless resources and the activist ethos of its founding mission . John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 emboldened the Foundation trustees and the rest of the postwar liberal establishment to act on their ambitions for the nation and the world. Modernization and the other, attendant ideological foundations of postwar liberalism reached the peak of their influence during the New Frontier, restoring the trustees’ confidence and impatience to make a real mark on American society. In the Kennedy era, the trustees felt that they could and must reaffirm the Foundation’s purpose. In the Directives, they recommitted themselves to the Gaither report’s mission of conflict resolution at home and abroad. They advocated for a program of “courageous experiment ,” in which the Foundation took “affirmative action” in dealing with an enormous range of domestic and international social problems through demonstrations of new programs and the creation of new institutions, some of which they fully expected might fail but should nevertheless be tested.1 The trustees’ renewed activism was also prompted by the Foundation’s ever-ballooning coffers, a product of the Foundation’s 1955 sale of more than $600 million in Ford Motor stock and of ongoing postwar national prosperity. By 1966, the Foundation’s $3.3 billion endowment was more than three times that of the Rockefeller Foundation, its nearest rival.2 In short, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today, Ford in the 1960s could afford to be ambitious and experimental, and even to make mistakes. As the trustees boasted in the Directives, the Ford Foundation was “probably the only private institution which can mount an effort sizable enough to make a critical difference 50 Chapter 2 in the course of events,” either at home or abroad. 3 Furthermore, ongoing national prosperity had bolstered elite liberals’ trust in the American system even beyond the Gaither era’s confidence. Such faith, along with growing social-scientific knowledge, meant that they believed more than ever before in the possibility of peaceful social change through systems reform leading to modernization. This worldview prompted the trustees to address the challenge of the black freedom struggle, and it also shaped their response for how to solve it. Now a key social tension, and not just one of many it had been for Gaither and his committee, the trustees felt a special obligation to address “the social and political implications of the American Negro population’s growing dissatisfaction with second-class citizenship.”4 This was a cause that Ford had abandoned in the mid-1950s, but a small number of other philanthropies had continued to support black equality, particularly in the South. As African Americans’ self-assertion had grown into a full-blown social movement prompting massive white resistance, the Foundation’s trustees and officers, compelled by their animating beliefs, sought to regain the ground they had lost in this field, not by funding the Southern civil rights movement, but by supporting systems reforms from above that would resolve racial conflict, achieve equal opportunity, and restore the nation’s equilibrium, particularly in American cities outside the South. The ongoing emergence of a visible and vocal black public made clear the inequities faced by African American communities throughout the nation, which were a stark exception to the aggregate upward mobility of the period. In the affluence of an era that President Kennedy proclaimed the “Decade of Development,” modernization once again became a crusade, at home as well as abroad, based on the belief that all could partake in the good life, given the right technocratic tweaks to the system and the appropriate behavioral adjustment.5 However, this return to activism did not mean that the trustees had regained confidence in their own early convictions that white racism was at the heart of the “Negro problem” or that desegregation was the solution. Rather, in their zeal for action on this matter, they accommodated their ongoing proscription on desegregationist solutions by supporting an improbable strategy of black assimilation through ongoing racial segregation—namely through an approach that I label developmental separatism...

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