Learning from the Carnegie Corporation: The Role of Foundations in the Lives of Minority Groups in a Democracy

• In Event: The Role of Foundations in Democracies

Abstract

For over a century, big foundations in the United States have made minority groups targets of their philanthropic spending. In the early years of the twentieth century, for example, the Rockefellers’ General Education Board and Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Corporation funded programs particularly marked for black Americans.

These foundations first advocated the Tuskegee model of segregated education for black Americans as the panacea to white-black relations in the United States. This model of black education was promoted by Booker T. Washington, principal and founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, and outlined in his famous Atlanta Compromise address of 1895. It was a form of education that trained black Americans to assume jobs in the lower rungs of the Southern economy; jobs that presumably would facilitate former slaves’ paths toward economic independence without disrupting white Southerners’ call for racial superiority in the region. It was an educational model that presupposed the need and attractiveness of maintaining a segregated society with whites as dominant and blacks as subordinate.

Then, in the later half of the twentieth century, big philanthropy became known as advocates of racial equality in the United States. By the 1960s, for example, the Carnegie Corporation had initiated a social justice agenda. The Rockefeller Foundation launched an equal opportunity division; and from its end, the Ford Foundation funded black freedom movement efforts.

As I explain in greater detail in my current book manuscript, this shift began when the Carnegie Corporation commissioned and funded the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944); a central text of the civil rights movement. In making this decision, the organization’s leadership was driven—not by concerns for grassroots activism, World War II ideology or Cold War foreign policy imperatives, but rather—both by a patronizing altruism toward black Americans and a self-interest in maintaining racial and economic stability in the United States. Even more, these were the same motivations that had led these white men to fund the Tuskegee model throughout the first decades of the century. If anything, what changed for them was their increased faith in the applied social sciences.

Reading this historical narrative of how and why the Carnegie Corporation came to commission and fund An American Dilemma, contemporary philanthropic organizations might feel tempted to want to mimic the steps that the Corporation took in funding Myrdal’s project. After all, many of today’s leaders herald this central text of the American civil rights movement as one of the most important results of grant-making by the foundation. However, it is worth noting that the Corporation’s staff and trustees who funded Myrdal’s project maintained the same motivations that had driven them to support the Tuskegee model of education; a funding practice that today’s philanthropic leaders are less proud.

This paper concludes with an analysis of what contemporary philanthropic leaders might learn from this historical case study; and in the process, how they can become vehicles for strengthening (rather than undermining) minority groups’ empowerment in democratic societies. For example, I will propose several ways that the historical actors in this paper could have avoided being patronizing in their altruism toward black Americans; what these white men could have kept in mind as they promoted education and then the applied social sciences as the key to race relations in the United States; and lastly, how their goals in achieving racial and economic stability necessarily made them less-than zealous advocates for black Americans’ equal status in society.

Author

• Maribel Morey, Clemson University