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Reviewed by:
  • Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund
  • Caroline S. V. Turner
Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund. By Marybeth Gasman. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 269 pp. Hardbound, $45.00.

In his prologue, John R. Thelin describes this work as emerging from "Marybeth Gasman's combination of storytelling and analysis about a group of black colleges' bold venture into collective fundraising—a venture that connected the college campuses of the segregated South with the boardrooms and corporate offices of New York City" (xii). In addition, through the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) venture, the campuses and their leaders were also connected with the dining rooms of several of New York's elite women (69). [End Page 152]

Gasman seeks to explore several questions in her work, including "How did the Fund use language and images to shape the public's understanding of black colleges? In the face of a changing society, how did the UNCF justify the continued existence of black colleges? How did the UNCF's fundraising publicly evolve over the years?" (9). Gasman asks very interesting questions and uses documents and interviews to craft a critical story of the UNCF's evolution, detailing primarily the period from the 1940s to the late 1970s.

She bases her book on archives and oral history collections, such as UNCF historical documents and fifteen oral history interviews of UNCF leaders, three conducted by Gasman and twelve Martia Goodson conducted in the 1980s for Columbia University's UNCF Oral History Project. While Gasman collected the archival papers used in this study from a wide range of nationally significant collections, the book does not include a description of author interview protocols or document/interview analysis.

Envisioning Black Colleges is an account of the UNCF detailing its founding by Frederick D. Patterson in 1944 through the 1970s when it embarked on its "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste" campaign. The later UNCF leadership of Christopher Edley, Sr., William H. Gray, III, and Michael Lomax, as well as their accomplishments, is briefly described. In 1944, Patterson organized the leadership of twenty-seven private black colleges with the goals of collectively "raising funds for member colleges promoting better public understanding and appreciation of the needs and problems of Negroes through fundraising, and setting an example of interracial cooperation in [the Fund's] national campaign" (23). Many challenges, even securing space for the fledgling organization, were a struggle in the context of racial intolerance.

The UNCF was to find a great asset in John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who financially supported the UNCF campaign. In 1944, he was named as the UNCF honorary national campaign advisory board chairman. Despite the white population's general fear about the "black menace" (37), Rockefeller, Jr., was convinced, and successfully influenced his peers to believe, that through the promotion of "the spirit of friendliness and tolerance between our white and colored citizens" (38), the UNCF would stimulate positive progress without changing the current social order. White contributions would promote a contented workforce under the control of educated black leaders. The idea was that "You had to have leadership if you didn't want a mob" (127). So, instead of being a threat to the country, black education would promote the status quo.

Within the time frame for this book, Gasman also describes another fund-raising arm of the UNCF, the New York Women's Division, where she points to the difference in fund-raising approaches between men and women. Through meetings, symposiums, luncheons, and teas, this cadre of elite women focused [End Page 153] on supporting the development of blacks as individuals, as opposed to cultivating black leaders who would then control the large workforce. Gasman's focus on the role of women leaders, such as Catherine Waddell and Edith Arthur McCullough, in the UNCF campaign is commendable. So often significant, historical contributions made by women remain unheralded and invisible.

Gasman adeptly uses archived UNCF ads to demonstrate the ways in which this organization had to conduct business in an environment of white privilege and black oppression. In the mid-1940s, Gasman writes, "the UNCF publicly represented...

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